Current Impactful Studies

These studies will have been recently published in the last few months, and rightly or wrongly receiving media attention. Negative media attention is by its very nature, vastly more common, as 'bad news travels or sells'. Some may be described as junk studies, but we must demonstrate why that is the the case in a Scientific logical manner,not just simply dismiss. Please consult E-Cigarette Research Forum that may well have examined and assessed a study you may have an interest

ongoing https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1251956936947331072.html

• Thread on twitter on COVID-19 and Smoking / Vaping

2019 E-cigarettes and Primary Care. A cross-sectional survey of nurses and GPs across the UK

• Key findings
• E-cigarettes are frequently brought up in conversations between clinicians and patients who smoke
• 3 in 10 clinicians say that the topic of ecigarettes is raised in the majority of conversations about smoking.
• Beliefs: Clinicians are often unsure in their beliefs around e-cigarettes
• Over 1 in 3 clinicians are unsure if ecigarettes are safe enough to recommendas a quit tool to patients who smoke.
• 1 in 3 are unsure whether e-cigarettes areaddictive.
• Advice: Many clinicians are reluctant tosuggest e-cigarettes as a tool to quit smoking
• When asked what advice they would give patients on e-cigarettes, 3 in 5 clinicianssaid “we do not know enough about themso I don’t endorse them”.
• 2 in 5 said they would feel uncomfortable recommending e-cigarettes to theirpatients who smoke.
• 1 in 6 clinicians said they would neverrecommend using e-cigarettes topatients who smoke.
• There was no clear agreement as to whether clinicians would primarily recommend e-cigarettes as a first line or last resort therapy.

HEALTH OUTCOMES IN COPD SMOKERS USING HEATED TOBACCO PRODUCTS: A 3-YEAR FOLLOW-UP < via Ricardo Polosa et al

• This study is the first to describe the long-term health effects of HTP use in COPD patients. Consistent improvements in respiratory symptoms, exercise tolerance, quality of life, and rate of disease exacerbations were observed in patients with COPD who abstained from smoking or substantially reduced their cigarette consumption by switching to HTP use.

Characteristics and Correlates of Recent Successful Cessation Among Adult Cigarette Smokers, United States,2018

• What is already known on this topic?
• Increasing smoking cessation reduces smoking-related disease, death, and economic costs.

• What is added by this report?
• In 2018, 7.1% of US adult smokers reported recent successful quitting. However, some groups had less success, including certain demographic groups, and some groups had greater success, including exclusive e-cigarette users, people with smoke-free home rules, and people who received advice to quit from a medical doctor.

• What are the implications for public health practice?
• To help more smokers quit, public health practitioners can ensure that evidence-based tobacco control interventions, including barrier-free access to evidence-based cessation treatments, are reaching all tobacco users, especially those who face greater barriers to quitting.

Associations between vaping and Covid-19: cross-sectional findings from the HEBECO study

• Conclusions Among UK adults, self-reported diagnosed/suspected Covid-19 was not associated with vaping status. Half of current vapers changed their vaping consumption since Covid-19, with the majority reporting an increase, and a minority was motivated to quit due to Covid-19.

Does Nicotine Prevent Cytokine Storms in COVID-19?

• We discuss how his excessive use of nicotine replacement therapy may have contributed to his emerging unscathed from COVID-19. Nicotine, an α7-nACh receptor agonist, may boost the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway and hinder the uncontrolled overproduction of pro-inflammatory cytokines triggered by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is understood to be the main pathway to poor outcomes and death in severe COVID-19.

Nicotine delivery and user reactions to Juul EU (20 mg/ml) compared with Juul US (59 mg/ml), cigarettes and other e-cigarette products

• Juul EU delivers much less nicotine to users than Juul US, and also less than refillable EC products. It may thus have more limited potential to help smokers quit.

What Motivates Smokers to Switch to ENDS? A Qualitative Study of Perceptions and Use

• Switching completely from cigarettes to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) may reduce health risks for addicted smokers. This paper provides information about perceptions and other factors that may influence smokers’ ENDS use and substitution for cigarettes.

Socioeconomic distribution of e-cigarette use among recent former regular smokers and current smokers at ages 25-26 in England

• Among young adult smokers in England, lower status occupational groups were more likely to use e-cigarettes on a non-daily basis than to have never used compared with higher status occupational groups. Compared with people in full-time employment, those without employment were less likely to use e-cigarettes daily than to have never used.

A randomised controlled single-centre open-label pharmacokinetic study to examine various approaches of nicotine delivery using electronic cigarettes

• Smokers who switch completely to e-cigarettes may reduce their relative risk of tobacco-related disease. Effective nicotine delivery from e-cigarettes is important in consumer acceptance. We assessed whether protonated nicotine and e-cigarette devices delivering greater aerosol mass increase nicotine delivery and product liking.

Commentary on Notley et al. (2020): Understanding transitions in the use of nicotine and tobacco products-the value of qualitative longitudinal research

• Qualitative longitudinal research is an underused methodology in addiction research, but can provide valuable insights into transitions in the use of addictive substances, including e‐cigarettes and tobacco smoking.

impact of lung diseases, smoking and e-cigarette use on the severity of COVID-19 illness at diagnosis

• The age distribution and prevalence of lung disease and their risk factors are described in the context of COVID-19 incidence and symptom severity in a whole-nation cohort of Icelanders. The cohort is younger and had less severe symptoms than in many previosly published studies of COVID-19. Interestingly, the prevalences of smoking and e-cigarette use were lower than in the Icelandic general population and they were not associated with symptom severity at diagnosis. To conclude, the results presented here indicate that underlying lung diseases are prevalent among people with severe COVID-19 symptoms but fail to demonstrate an association between cigarette smoking or e-cigarette smoking with COVID-19 severity.

New Lancet Study: vaping is rare among individuals who have never smoked conventional cigarettes.

• E-cigarette use in China remains low but has increased substantially between 2015 and 2019. Our study identified increased e-cigarette use among subpopulations, and use patterns, that warrant further attention from public health policy makers in China.

Effects of tobacco cigarettes,e-cigarettes...on endothelial function reaction from Science Media Centre

• Prof John Britton, Director of the UK Centre for Tobacco & Alcohol Studies and Consultant in Respiratory Medicine, University of Nottingham, said:

• “This paper provides an unsystematic overview on evidence relating to the likely relative risks of nicotine use, and of questionable reliability: for example, that e-cigarette use increases the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by 194% but COPD is a disease with a lead time of decades, so to attribute a risk directly to e-cigarettes – which have been widely used for less than a decade and are almost exclusively used by former smokers – is inappropriate.”

• Dr Nick Hopkinson, Reader in Respiratory Medicine at Imperial College London, said:

• “Most users of e-cigarettes are doing so in order to cut down or quit smoking to reduce the risk to their health. In the UK, of the 3.6million people who vape 54% have quit smoking completely https://ash.org.uk/media-and-news/press-releases-media-and-news/in-2019-around-half-as-many-britons-now-vape-as-smoke-and-the-majority-are-ex-smokers/ . The harmful chemicals present in cigarette smoke are either absent from e-cigarette vapour or present at much lower levels, which is why reports like “Nicotine without the smoke” https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/nicotine-without-smoke-tobacco-harm-reduction from the Royal College of Physicians support vaping as a means of reducing an individual’s harm from smoking.

• More comment at the provided link

E-Cig Experimentation data analysis from France

• Experimenting with e‐cigarettes first (as opposed to tobacco first) appears to be associated with a reduction in the risk of daily tobacco smoking among French adolescent at ages 17‐18.5, but this risk varies negatively with age at experimentation, and early e‐cigarette experimenters are at higher risk.

E-Cigarette Research Forum

• For a monthly subscription request ask tobaccocontrol@cancer.org.uk

Exclusive E-Cigarette Users Report Lower Levels of Respiratory Symptoms Relative to Dual E-Cigarette and Cigarette Users | Nicotine & Tobacco Research | Oxford Academic

• Findings suggest that differences in respiratory symptoms between dual and exclusive e-cigarette users appear to be attributable to combustible cigarette smoking, rather than more intense or frequent e-cigarette use across groups.

Statments from NGOs etc

THR Statments from NGOs