The study, published in the journal Addictive Behavior, states that teenage boys involved were nearly three times as likely to start smoking as other teenage boys with similar risk profiles and more than twice as likely to be tobacco. not to try smoke.
“For a separate study, from a purely scientific point of view, we would give everyone an e-cigarette, follow them for a few years to see if they start smoking, then relapse. clock and not give them e-cigarettes, “said study author Brittney Keller-Hamilton of Ohio State University in the US.
“Or we would have randomly assigned children to vape or not to vape. We can’t do any of those things, obviously,” Keller-Hamilton said.
So they looked at an advanced statistical approach – “causal decision” – in which they compared users and non-e-cigarette users who began the study with known risk factors for vaping based on a number of factors, including alcohol use. , marijuana use, immobility and parental education levels and tobacco history.
The research team identified two groups of young people who were equally likely to start vaping based on a number of factors, and then compared the results over the course of the study.
They found that e-cigarette users were 2.7 times as likely to try to smoke.
This study followed more than 1,200 boys from urban Franklin County and nine rural Appalachian counties in Ohio for two years. They were 11 to 16 years old when they entered the study.
The new findings support ongoing efforts to limit access to tobacco products to people 21 and older and actions to prevent vaping among children, including measures that making e-cigarettes harder to find and less attractive.
“I hope our findings provide stronger evidence to policymakers and others about the link between e-cigarette use and tobacco use,” the study’s authors wrote.