New Study From Hollings Cancer Center: E-Cigarettes Do Have Value In Aiding Smoking Cessation

New Study from MUSC Hollings Cancer Center* Smoking is Harmful to Health, E-Cigarettes Banned for Minors, Not Recommended for Non-Smokers
A new study just released by researchers at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center in South Carolina, USA, suggests that e-cigarettes do have value as a smoking cessation aid. The new study, which is now known to be one of the largest e-cigarette trials in the United States, recruited smokers from 11 U.S. cities, and the entire study took four years.

Matthew Carpenter, first author of the study published in Clinical Medicine and co-director of the Cancer Control Research Program at Hollins University, said, "While e-cigarettes are not a panacea for quitting smoking, we were surprised to find that all of the hypotheses tested in the study were confirmed. The use of e-cigarettes helped the participants in the trial to quit smoking cigarettes - even though those participants had indicated in advance that they had no intention of quitting."

"In our trial, almost all of the hypotheses proved to be correct, which is rare," Carpenter said. "Regardless of how e-cigarettes are perceived by outsiders, those who were offered e-cigarette products demonstrated greater quit rates and fewer health hazards compared to those who were not."
Carpenter and his colleagues designed the pilot study in a more scientific and naturalistic way, staying as close to real-world conditions as possible.

Carpenter said that previous studies that have demonstrated that e-cigarettes have a smoking cessation effect have been very structured, and these studies have often recruited people who wanted to quit smoking as test subjects and provided them with detailed instructions on how to use the e-cigarettes.

However, real-world situations are less structured, and people who don't want to quit using e-cigarettes end up quitting, which makes for a more compelling case for the effectiveness of e-cigarettes in quitting smoking.

Therefore, in this study by Carpenter, smokers who wanted to quit and those who didn't want to quit were recruited and were not given much instruction on how to use e-cigarettes as a way to see how effective e-cigarettes are at quitting smoking in a real-world situation. The trial was divided into an e-cigarette group and a control group, with the e-cigarette group being given access to e-cigarettes and the control group not being issued e-cigarettes.

The study showed that those in the e-cigarette group were more likely to report quitting combustible cigarettes altogether. They were also more likely to report that they reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked per day and the number of "quit attempts." "Quit attempts are an important measure because people often need multiple attempts to successfully quit smoking."

The study involved trial participants from people in 11 U.S. cities over a four-year period. The study will provide another data point for the public health community and policymakers to decide what to do about e-cigarettes.

"No one wants kids to smoke e-cigarettes, and we should do everything we can to stop that from happening, but we shouldn't deny e-cigarettes to adult smokers who want to quit." Carpenter said. : E-cigarettes do have value as a smoking cessation aid