Quitting smoking with vaping will end up using both regular cigarettes and e-cigarettes

People who want to quit smoking often switch to vaping. Researchers from the USA have concluded that this is ineffective and often leads to “double” addiction.

In an average year, about 70 percent of smokers make an attempt to quit smoking. And only five percent of them, without receiving any nicotine replacement therapy, do so successfully. Most are unable to quit smoking even with treatment and “helping practices.”

Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine (USA) conducted a study involving 111,823 people with tobacco use problems seen in outpatient clinics at Barnes European Hospital from 2018 to 2020. The medics presented their findings in the journal Thorax.

In the first year of the study, about 0.8 percent of patients reported smoking both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes to quit the habit. But by the third year, the end of data collection, that number had risen to 2.3 percent. And researchers found that about one in five (20.8 percent) of those who smoked both cigarettes quit within a year (compared with 16.8 percent of those who abused regular tobacco).

Of the “dual” smokers, only 17 percent were able to kick the habit on their own; 29 percent became nonsmokers through specialized therapy (rather than vaping). On the other hand, smoking cessation rates were higher among patients who smoked both types of cigarettes. This was also, incidentally, confirmed by earlier research by another group of US scientists, which showed that people who did not plan to quit tobacco were more likely to do so if they switched to e-cigarettes.

But there is one problem that the scientists in the new study identified. About two-thirds of those who vape remained smokers a year later, even after treatment. So the researchers concluded that only traditional smoking cessation therapy, not vaping, is of real benefit.