Effectiveness of e-cigs to quit smoking underestimated?

[Mig01]

I saw studies on the successfullness of vaping as a way to quit smoking and, according to those studies, vaping is more successful than other methods but not by that much.
I must say that at first I found those results surprising. After all, in my case I have not even been tempted to smoke an analog cig at all since I started vaping. Also if I look at the forum participants, tha vast majority have either quit smoking completely or reduced their tobacco consumption very significantly.
Then, I looked in more detail in those published studies and realized that most of them were completed two years ago, with participants using obsolete technology, i.e. e-cigs that delivered nicote much less effectively than those being available today.
I would be curious about the success rate of vaping as a substitute to smoking measured in a study where participants use more uptodate equipment and e-liquids. I suspect that this success rate would be above 60%, leaving in the dust any other way to quit.

 

[wv2win]

The latest study out of the UK published in Addiction journal showed a 60 percent success rate.

 

[Mig01]

thanks for the info

 

[fourtytwo]

Keep in mind two things.
1) The studies are often written to support a pre-existing position
2) We here are the success stories.

 

[Mig01]

Yes we are the success stories and it is the reason why our stories are not a representative sample. We are members of a forum about vaping. So, most of us have adopted vaping and a good number of us have decreased our tobacco consumption or even given up smoking altogether.
What is needed is a representative sample of all the people who have tried vaping with the modern hardware and liquids to establish the proportion of those people who have quit tobacco.
It is true that studies are often conducted to support a pre-existing position. It is also true that when such studies do not give results supporting that pre existing position they are often just not published. When they are, significant facts are omitted. For instance, the FDA press releases on one of their studies were quick to point that they had found nitrosamins in the liquids. Nitrosamins are carcinogenics that are present in cigarettes and also as an impurity in nicotine extracted from tobacco. What they conveniently failed to mention was the fact that the concentration of nitrosamins was 1000 times higher in cigarettes than in the liquids. Not revealing that fact leads people to believe that nitrosamins are just as present in our liquids as they are in cigarettes

 

[Zurd]

I don't have any numbers about ecigs but it's well known that NRT doesn't work much so ecigs has to be higher than NRT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_replacement_therapy
[...] reviewed 20 studies [...] published between 1990 and 2007 [...] A quit rate of 53% at four weeks fell to only 15% at 1 year.

If you ask ppl to quit cold turkey, you can probably get 15% too, NRT doesn't work much!

 

[edyle]

Yes we are the success stories and it is the reason why our stories are not a representative sample. We are members of a forum about vaping. So, most of us have adopted vaping and a good number of us have decreased our tobacco consumption or even given up smoking altogether.
What is needed is a representative sample of all the people who have tried vaping with the modern hardware and liquids to establish the proportion of those people who have quit tobacco.
It is true that studies are often conducted to support a pre-existing position. It is also true that when such studies do not give results supporting that pre existing position they are often just not published. When they are, significant facts are omitted. For instance, the FDA press releases on one of their studies were quick to point that they had found nitrosamins in the liquids. Nitrosamins are carcinogenics that are present in cigarettes and also as an impurity in nicotine extracted from tobacco. What they conveniently failed to mention was the fact that the concentration of nitrosamins was 1000 times higher in cigarettes than in the liquids. Not revealing that fact leads people to believe that nitrosamins are just as present in our liquids as they are in cigarettes

vaping is more successful than other methods but not by that much.

Another significant omission is when you count people who have quit cigarettes but continue to vape instead as not having quit.