Empty efforts: e-cigarettes don't help you quit smoking

Employees at the University of California, San Diego published in PLOS One the results of a study on how and how effectively their compatriots quit smoking.

Irina Ziganshina

In the first part, in the field of view of scientists were 9021 people who smoked daily. 2770 of them tried to quit. About 24% used electronic cigarettes for this, and 19% used other means: medicines, patches, sprays and lozenges. The rest of the group used nothing. After a year, only about 10% of people were able to abstain from nicotine, and none of the methods was shown to be more effective than others. And about 82% of those who tried to quit smoking were still smoking after two years.

In the second part of the study, based on a group of 2,535 adults, the team found that those who used e-cigarettes were more likely to still use these products two years later. That is, they are likely to remain addicted to nicotine.

“When you look at the population as a whole, e-cigarettes do not help you quit smoking,”, - summarize the study authors. "They don't solve the problem of weaning people off nicotine".

Nevertheless, according to scientists, for individuals, electronic cigarettes can still become a useful tool - a kind of incentive that makes them at least try.