Daily smoking has always been very popular amongst French teens. The study titled, “Does e-cigarette experimentation increase the transition to daily smoking among young ever-smokers in France?” looks at whether e-cig experimentation, which is also very common, increases the likelihood of smoking.
Using retrospective data from a 2017 French national representative survey of almost 40,000 participants, the researchers analyzed the link between vaping and smoking. The number of participants who had ever smoked was 21,401, and within this group, adolescents who reported having ever used e-cigarettes, were less likely than those who did not to transition to daily smoking at 17: RR = 0.62 95 %CI [0.60 – 0.64].
The researchers found that this pattern remained constant, whether e-cigarettes were tried before or after smoking. To this effect, concluded the researchers, the study indicated no evidence that vaping leads to smoking, “Our results found no evidence of an increased risk of transitioning to daily smoking at 17 among ever-smokers who also experimented with e-cigarettes. Further studies should investigate the longer-term role of vaping on future smoking habits with the use of causal inference methods.”
