University of Iowa researchers analyzed survey data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and found that the amount of adults who have tried e-cigarettes has risen from 12.6% in 2014, to 15.3% in 2016.
Garin Buttermore, a community-health consultant for the Iowa Department of Public Health, pointed out that he was not surprised by these findings. “I don’t think it was terribly surprising to me that more adults are using e-cigarettes, as was reported,” he said.
While Mark Vander Weg, a UI associate professor of internal medicine and psychological and brain sciences, said that the fact that not enough is known about the effect of e-cigarettes on one’s health, is a problem.
“We really know almost nothing about the long-term health effects of it, and that’s going to take a while, of course, to figure out,” Vander Weg said. “What we do know is a little bit about the chemicals that people who use these get exposed to.”
Missing the bigger picture
Inline with the UI study, the 2016 Monitoring the Future (MTF) annual survey results indicated that vaping rates had also dropped for the second consecutive year amongst adolescents, falling from 16.2% to 12.5% among 12th graders and from 14.0% to 11.0% among 10th graders. But more importantly, the MTF confirmed that smoking rates have dropped within every grade, once again blasting the infamous ‘Gateway Theory’.
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