More Bad News Regarding E-cigarette Use by Adolescents :

Nearly every month for the past year or two we have published studies noting the risks of adolescents using e-cigarettes. We have published enough on this important topic to put them into one of our “Pediatric Collections”—a compilation of all the recent e-cigarette articles published in our journal.  This month, we add to this body of work a study by Barrington-Trimis et al. (10.1542/peds.2018-0486) looking at how frequent tobacco cigarette smoking is after using e-cigarettes.  The authors share data from three prospective cohort studies in California and Connecticut over a two- to three-year period to see if baseline e-cigarette use increases the frequency of conventional cigarette use.  Not surprisingly, e-cigarette use was associated with beginning to smoke conventional cigarettes.  This is interesting given how e-cigarettes are advertised to help smokers stop, not start or increase their frequency of using tobacco cigarettes.  The authors also provide information on those teens who were smoking cigarettes at baseline or e-cigarettes at baseline exclusively and what happens to their smoking frequencies of both over time.  If a teen patient tells you e-cigarettes will help them curb their desire for a combustible or conventional cigarette, show them this study—and it might smoke out their desire to use e-cigarettes as well as conventional ones.  Link to the study and learn more.