e-Cigarette and Cigarette Use Among Youth: Gateway or Common Liability?
Menée aux Etats-Unis à partir de données d'enquêtes réalisées entre 2015 et 2019 auprès de 8 671 adolescents n'ayant jamais fumé de cigarette (âge : 12-17 ans), cette étude analyse le risque de devenir fumeur dans les 2 ans qui suivent une utilisation de cigarettes électroniques
Résumé en anglais
In 2018, the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s report on electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) concluded that youths use of e-cigarettes is associated with increased risk of ever cigarette smoking. Ever since, the public health community has been preoccupied with e-cigarettes as a gateway to cigarette smoking among young people. While numerous studies have reported an increased risk of cigarette experimentation among youth e-cigarette users, to my knowledge, no research has demonstrated whether or not e-cigarette use is associated with sustained cigarette smoking. Given that cigarettes are overwhelmingly responsible for most tobacco-caused morbidity and mortality, addressing this research gap seems paramount. In this study, Sun and colleagues explore this important question and considered a variety of cigarette smoking patterns, as well as differences in absolute risk. Using data from the Population Assessment on Tobacco Use and Health (PATH) longitudinal cohort study, Sun et al studied more than 8000 cigarette-naive youths from waves 3 to 5. They found that youths who had used e-cigarettes at baseline (wave 3) had higher odds of continued cigarette smoking, but the absolute risks of continued smoking at wave 5 were very small and did not significantly differ by baseline e-cigarette use. Moreover, the prevalence of frequent smoking, defined as 20 or more days in the past 30 days, 2 years later (wave 5) was so low (0.2%), the authors could not model this outcome due to its rarity. In other words, while e-cigarette use was associated with future cigarette smoking, the pattern of cigarette smoking itself was not clinically meaningful.
