Electronic cigarettes or Vapes have been a trend for years now and a new study claims that teenagers who use such device are most likely to become traditional cigarette smokers in the future. The study also claims that Vapers will smoke more in the future.
Los Angeles Times reported that 3,000 students from Los Angeles County public schools were studied by experts. They were into vaping at the beginning of their sophomore year and were found out to be traditional cigarette smokers in the next six months as compared to their classmates who do not use e-cigarettes.
These Vapers were also more likely to become daily smokers and consume more cigarettes. The study was published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Dr. Tom Frieden, the director for the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control Prevention, has been one of those who warned about the effects of e-cigarettes. In 2013, he warned that teens get hooked on nicotine once they start using Vapes in spite of the notion that using electronic cigarette lowers the nicotine level.
Frieden pointed out before that once teens would get addicted to Vaping, they would eventually try regular cigarettes. Hence, it would cause more problems.
According to Time, Adam Leventhal, the lead author of the study, director of Health, Emotion, and Addiction Laboratory at the Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California said Vaping is not just an emerging public issue because teenagers are not just experimenting. Instead, they progress to more regular levels of smoking.
Laventhal noted that the amount of vaping mattered because the more teens vaped, the more they smoked regular cigarettes. Laventhal also said that Vaping could influence teens to transition to smoke regular cigarettes, which will eventually lead to more smoking, in the traditional sense, because teens who vaped are familiar with the taste.
As opposed to teens who never vaped, they might find their first use of a traditional cigarette not pleasurable due to the taste. The teens who never vaped and started with traditional cigarette smoking will then smoke less.
Ninety percent of adult smokers were found to have picked up the vice during their teenager years. Nicotine exposure during adolescence also has lasting and adverse consequences when it comes to brain development. Meanwhile, Laventhal and his team are following the same group of teens in order to understand the effect of Vaping in terms of health, behavior and attitude over time.
