More Adults Trying E-Cigs, but Less Are Using Them Regularly

A recent study by the University of Iowa has found that more adults are trying e-cigarettes, but the amount of people who are using them regularly keeps decreasing.

Diane Caruana

June 13, 2018

University of Iowa researchers analyzed survey data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and found that the amount of adults who have tried e-cigarettes has risen from 12.6% in 2014, to 15.3% in 2016.

The study which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last month, also indicated that regular e-cigarette use has been consistently decreasing.

However, the study which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last month, also indicated that regular e-cigarette use has been consistently decreasing and noted a drop from 3.7% in 2014 to 3.2% in 2016.

Garin Buttermore, a community-health consultant for the Iowa Department of Public Health, pointed out that he was not surprised by these findings. “I don’t think it was terribly surprising to me that more adults are using e-cigarettes, as was reported,” he said.

While Mark Vander Weg, a UI associate professor of internal medicine and psychological and brain sciences, said that the fact that not enough is known about the effect of e-cigarettes on one’s health, is a problem.

“We really know almost nothing about the long-term health effects of it, and that’s going to take a while, of course, to figure out,” Vander Weg said. “What we do know is a little bit about the chemicals that people who use these get exposed to.”

Missing the bigger picture

A PATH study released this time last year had indicated that e-cigs are less addictive than regular cigarettes.

Interestingly, the above seemed to focus solely on the fact that more people are trying e-cigarettes and ignored the fact that long term consumption is decreasing. Infact inline with this last point, a PATH study released this time last year by researchers from Penn State College of Medicine, had indicated that e-cigarettes are less addictive than their combustible counterparts. Additionally, numerous other studies have shown that most people turn to vaping in order to quit smoking.

Inline with the UI study, the 2016 Monitoring the Future (MTF) annual survey results indicated that vaping rates had also dropped for the second consecutive year amongst adolescents, falling from 16.2% to 12.5% among 12th graders and from 14.0% to 11.0% among 10th graders. But more importantly, the MTF confirmed that smoking rates have dropped within every grade, once again blasting the infamous ‘Gateway Theory’.

Read Further: The Daily Iowan