Parents who vape of smoke are 55 percent more likely to have teenagers who will pick up the habit, according to research presented at the European Respiratory Society International Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
The researchers have also found that the proportion who have tried e-cigarettes has been increasing dramatically and that although boys are more likely to use e-cigarettes, the rate of use among girls is increasing more rapidly, according to the study of Irish teens, according to media reports.
The research was carried out by a team at the Tobacco-Free Research Institute Ireland (TFRI), in Dublin. The group examined data on 6,216 17-18-year-olds, including data on whether their parents smoked while they were growing up. The teenagers were asked whether they smoked or used e-cigarettes.
The study showed that teenagers whose parents smoked were around 55 percent more likely to have tried e-cigarettes and around 51 percent more likely to have tried smoking.
The team also combined several Irish data sets to provide the most comprehensive analyses of teenage e-cigarette use in Ireland, with information on more than 10,000 Irish teenagers (aged 16 to 17), to look at the overall numbers of teenagers trying or regularly using e-cigarettes and how this is changing over time.
This showed that the proportion who had tried e-cigarettes had increased from 23 percent in 2014 to 39 percent in 2019.
The main reasons teenagers gave for trying e-cigarettes were curiosity (66 percent) and because their friends were vaping (29 percent). Only 3 percent said it was to quit smoking.
The proportion who said they had never used tobacco when they first tried e-cigarettes increased from 32 percent in 2015 to 68 percent in 2019.