According to study released on Wednesday, e-cigarette usage is the single greatest risk factor for adolescents starting to smoke tobacco, surpassing social norms, poor mental health, and false beliefs about the negative effects of smoking.
In the 2017 Australian Secondary School Students Alcohol and Drug Survey (Assad), 4,266 Victorian students between the ages of 12 and 17 participated anonymously. Researchers then focused on 3,410 of those students who said they had never smoked even a partial cigarette.
Questions were posed to the students regarding their usage of drugs, mental health, social groups, absences from school, and e-cigarette use. They were also questioned how likely they thought it was that they would start smoking in the upcoming year.
The study, conducted by Cancer Council Victoria and the University of Melbourne, discovered that more than one in ten of the students who said they had never smoked were still at risk for smoking tobacco.
The study, which was published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, indicated that having ever used an e-cigarette was the best predictor of future smoking. The perception of smokers as more popular than non-smokers, the presence of at least one close friend who smokes, the belief that occasionally smoking one or two cigarettes is not harmful, and the presence of depressive symptoms were all independently linked to smoking vulnerability.
The study’s co-author, Prof. Sarah Durkin, a principal research fellow at Cancer Council Victoria’s Centre for Behavioural Research, said the results were consistent with information released in May, which showed a rise in tobacco use among youths aged 14 to 17 for the first time in about 20 years. Additionally, it is in line with other research from around the world that indicated young people who vape are three times more likely to start smoking, according to Durkin.
Because the Assad study’s data were gathered at school and away from parents, according to Prof. Emily Banks, an epidemiologist at the Australian National University and a recognised authority on tobacco prevention, they were of the highest quality.
But Banks claimed that the data predated the “huge” rise in e-cigarette use in Australia because Covid-19 lockdowns delayed the 2020 Assad survey, which is currently being performed.
According to Banks, those who use e-cigarettes are more likely to later start smoking because it softens them up, it gets them used to the hand-mouth motion, it gets them addicted to nicotine, gets them exposed to some of the advertising, and makes them think more positively about inhaling something to get that hit.
The “huge incursion” of vaping, according to Public Health Association of Australia CEO Terry Slevin, is to blame for the recent rise in young people’s cigarette smoking rates. Slevin claimed that in order to increase sales of their goods, the tobacco and e-cigarette firms want to “claw back” the number of people who are nicotine addicts.
The government is presently in talks with the states and territories about how to enact strict new laws aimed at protecting minors after announcing in May that Australia would outlaw non-prescription vapes.
Leading tobacco control specialist Prof. Becky Freeman of the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health said the study strengthened the case for “why we need to act on e-cigarettes.”
Not only because e-cigarettes and of themselves are dangerous for young people, but also because they can lead to smoking uptake, which we have decades and decades of evidence knowing just how harmful that is.
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