Can Vaping E-cigarettes help quit smoking?

 Can Vaping E-cigarettes help quit smoking?

Almost every seventh smoker has already taken an e-cigarette. Often not just from pure curiosity - but in the hope of finally getting rid of the sick tobacco products through the detour of the electronic counterpart. According to the Drugs and Drug Report of the Federal Ministry of Health, most people who try e-cigarettes either want to smoke less or to satisfy their nicotine problems in a not so harmful way. Almost one in five have set themselves the goal of completely quitting smoking.

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But how realistic is that? Can e-cigarettes actually support long-term tobacco smokers in a planned withdrawal? And are the fumes that are inhaled through the e-cigarette really healthier than tobacco smoke? Scientists around the world have already dealt with these issues and published numerous studies on the subject. The differences in the quality of the examinations are, however, large, some of the studies have even been sponsored by the tobacco industry.

For this reason, a group of independent experts - the Cochrane Tobacco Addiction Group (Cochrane-TAG) regularly makes a search for new studies on the topic of nicotine insufficiency and examines to what extent the investigations correspond to good scientific standards.

Waiting for new studies

The results of the latest Cochrane analysis are consistently positive: electronic cigarettes could help tobacco smokers to quit smoking, according to the report by the scientists around Jamie Hartmann-Boyce from the British University of Oxford in Radcliffe in the Cochrane Library . With a maximum of two years of use of e-cigarettes, no serious side effects were encountered, the authors write. Hartmann-Boyce and her colleagues come to the same conclusion as in their first review on the subject of December 2014.

This is not surprising: After all, the small clearomizer  have only been available worldwide since 2006. Three years earlier the first copies had been launched in China. Soon, however, electronic cigarettes were investigated by scientists.

Hartmann-Boyce and her team were able to draw on 13 studies from the years 2004 to 2014 for their first overview work - of which, however, only two of high quality. In these two investigations from New Zealand and Italy, with a total of 662 participants, researchers concluded that the use of e-cigarettes containing nicotine-containing liquids against nicotine-free counterparts increases the chance that smokers will be without tobacco cigarettes for at least six months. In the group that received liquids with nicotine, nine percent of smokers managed to achieve this, while in the nicotine-free comparison group, this was only four percent.

The new review also includes the data from eleven observation studies. These do not provide new information on the extent to which e-cigarettes support a planned smoke stop. However, according to Hartmann-Boyce and her colleagues, these investigations indicated that there is no serious side-effects for a maximum of two-year use of e-cigarettes. The subjects most frequently reported irritations in the mouth and throat - which, however, usually disappeared after some time.

"The vapor of the e-juice contained in the e-cigarettes is ten to six hundred times less toxic than the smoke of a tobacco cigarette, depending on the method of investigation". This is mainly due to the fact that thousands of health-damaging, often carcinogenic substances are produced during the combustion of tobacco.

"Smokers use cigarettes mainly because of nicotine, but they die from the combustion products." Compared to tobacco smoke, the number of substances emitted from an e-cigarette is rather low.

The Cloud generally consists of a mixture of propylene glycol and / or glycerin, various aromatics and usually nicotine in various concentrations. However, these ingredients are considered to be less healthy. Propylene glycol can irritate the airways. Some of the aromas are known to trigger allergies. Nicotine is addictive, promotes the growth of tumors, harms unborn children, affects the maturation of the brain in young people and can lead to poisoning in high concentrations.
"In my opinion, other ways such as nicotine patches or chewing gums are safer than e-cigarettes," says expert. Which method can help a planned smoking stop better, however, the previous investigations could not show. "How e-cigarettes compare with nicotine patches has only been studied in one of the two high-quality studies," explains Walsh. And this had not been able to establish a significant difference in the efficacy of both ways. In addition, the Cochrane group reported that the number of subjects was too small to find a clear answer to this question.

The positive news is that at the moment several methodically very good studies are running, says Walsh. The Cochrane-TAG has already come across 15 unfinished studies that seem to be suitable for another version of their review.


"At the moment, it looks like it is, and that corresponds to my daily clinical experience, as if the e-cigarette has a potential for deepening," says the addiction physician Higgins. Among other things, this could be due to the fact that nicotine is much slower in the brain when inhaled than in smoking. "The kick, as we know it from the tobacco cigarette, remains with the e-cigarette," says Higgins. And this in turn could lead to the grip on this becoming increasingly unattractive.

Nikotinsucht Können E-Zigaretten helfen, mit dem Rauchen aufzuhören? – Quelle: http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/25927948 ©2017

Nikotinsucht Können E-Zigaretten helfen, mit dem Rauchen aufzuhören? – Quelle: http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/25927948 ©2017