Tag: National Youth Tobacco Survey

  • Study Finds Teen Vaping Down, Some Start Younger

    Study Finds Teen Vaping Down, Some Start Younger

    Photo: eldarnurkovic

    Although the prevalence of teen vaping has declined in recent years, those who do vape are starting younger and using e-cigarettes more intensely, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in collaboration with Stanton A. Glantz, a retired professor from the University of California at San Francisco.

    In the analysis of data from the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey, a nationally-representative survey of middle and high school students in grades 6–12, researchers found that e-cigarette prevalence among youth peaked in 2019 then declined, but e-cigarette initiation age dropped between 2014 and 2021, and intensity of use and addiction increased after the introduction of protonated nicotine products

    Protonated nicotine is created by adding acid to the e-cigarette liquid, which makes the nicotine easier to inhale. Since Juul pioneered protonated nicotine, it has been widely adopted by other e-cigarette companies.

    Age at first use of e-cigarettes fell by 1.9 months per year, while age at first use of cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco did not change significantly. By 2017, e-cigarettes became the most common first tobacco product used.

    E-cigarette nicotine addiction, measured as the odds of use within 5 minutes of waking, an indicator of addiction, increased over time. By 2019 more youth e-cigarette users were using their first tobacco product within five minutes of waking than for cigarettes and all other products combined. The percent of sole e-cigarette users who used e-cigarettes within five minutes of waking was around 1 percent through 2017, but then it increased every year, reaching 10.3 percent youth using their first e-cigarette within five minutes of waking by 2021.

    Median e-cigarette use also increased from three to five days per month in 2014–2018 to six to nine days per month in 2019–2020 and 10 to 19 days per month in 2021.

    The recently released 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey data show that 2.55 million adolescents use e-cigarettes and 27.6 percent of adolescents use e-cigarettes daily. The comparable numbers reported in this paper for 2021 were 2.1 million and 24.7 percent.

    “The increasing intensity of use of modern e-cigarettes highlights the clinical need to address youth addiction to these new high nicotine products over the course of many clinical encounters,” said senior author Jonathan P. Winickoff, a pediatrician at MGH and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, in a press note.

    “In addition, stronger regulation including state and local comprehensive bans on the sale of flavored tobacco products such as voting YES on Proposition 31 on California’s November ballot, should be implemented,” said first author Stanton A. Glantz, a retired UCSF professor of medicine

  • VTA Skeptical of FDA’s Latest Youth Vaping Analysis

    VTA Skeptical of FDA’s Latest Youth Vaping Analysis

    After the U.S. Food and Drug Administration released its latest National Youth Tobacco Survey, Vapor Technology Association (VTA) Executive Director Tony Abboud said the FDA’s reporting of the data is misleading.

    “Yesterday, the FDA, in coordination with the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ], released new data from the 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) on e-cigarette use among U.S. youth,” Abboud stated. “The FDA represents the NYTS data to show that youth vaping ‘remains high,’ yet a deeper dive into the data show only a small uptick in experimental or infrequent use while regular use remains flat or is slightly down.

    Abboud notes that since 2019, according to the CDC, the number of high school students who have tried vaping (1 time in the last 30 days) has dropped by 50 percent, and the number of middle school students has plummeted by 70 percent. During that same time period, the number of high-school students who ‘frequently’ vape dropped by 37 percent and the number of middle school students dropped by 65 percent.

    ” FDA’s near single-minded focus on youth who experiment with vaping versus those who are frequent users ignores what clearly is a consistent trend of youth away from vaping products. Rather than focusing on removing products from the market in an attempt to impact youth vaping, the FDA should instead support common-sense regulatory reforms that would better restrict access to products instead,” Abboud stated. “Simply removing products from the market is not the answer when those products are also proven to help adult smokers quit.”

    Abboud explained that it is well documented that flavored vapor products help adult smokers to switch to less harmful vaping and “study after study after study” has confirmed the data. Since 2010, when e-cigarettes became widely available in the U.S., smoking rates have declined by more than half, he stated.

    “Tobacco use is down. Youth vaping is down. These are both good things and are not in dispute. Unfortunately, there are still 40 million Americans addicted to cigarettes,” Abboud stated. “Every year, 500,000 die from smoking-related diseases and yet less than three percent of our kids are using vapes on a regular basis. The FDA’s failure to acknowledge this reality ignores the role vaping plays in harm reduction and smoking cessation, and puts more lives at risk.”

  • Study Suggests Teen Vapers Would have Been Smokers

    Study Suggests Teen Vapers Would have Been Smokers

    A new study has concluded that teens who use e-cigarettes would have likely become combustible cigarette smokers if vaping products did not exist. Published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research, researchers found that “vaping is largely concentrated among non-smoking youth who would likely have smoked prior to the introduction of e-cigarettes, and the introduction of e-cigarettes has coincided with an acceleration in the decline in youth smoking rates.”

    man vaping in park
    Credit: Krystian Graba

    Dr. Natasha Sokol, a fellow at Brown University’s Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies, and Dr. Justin Feldman, a fellow at Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, wanted to find whether there was any truth to the so-called “gateway” theory: the idea that vaping, for teenagers, is a path toward smoking. The results they found is that e-cigarettes may be an important tool for population-level harm reduction, even considering their impact on youth.

    Sokol and Feldman ran a regression analysis of 12th-graders with data culled from the “Monitoring the Future” report, a survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) that measures different forms of drug use by adolescents nationwide. The researcher’s modeling examined variables including age, race and ethnicity, geographic region of residency, grade point average, alcohol consumption and parents’ educational attainment, among several others. The end goal was to determine whether youth who used vaping products between 2014 and 2018 would have become smokers.

    “Our model predicted smoking prevalence quite accurately prior to the availability of e-cigarettes,” Sokol told Filter. “But once e-cigarettes became available in a widespread way, it increasingly overestimated the prevalence [of smoking]. So the prevalence was decreasing, but our model based on a pre-e-cigarette era was predicting a decrease but not as steep. [The youth] who had a low propensity to smoke after e-cigarettes were available were exceedingly unlikely to use e-cigarettes.”

    The researchers concluded that the youth who do vape are generally those who would have been smoking were vapes unavailable. “The decline in youth smoking,” Sokol continued, “really accelerated after the availability of e-cigarettes.”

    “There are two bits of good news in this,” Clive Bates, a tobacco control expert and former director of Action on Smoking and Health (UK), told Filter. “The first is that young smokers will be diverted into vaping and probably spared a life of smoking. The second is that most of the vaping among kids who never would have been smokers will be pretty transient and likely not persist after a period of experimentation.”

  • Fewer Young Americans Using E-Cigarettes

    Fewer Young Americans Using E-Cigarettes

    Photo: Aliaksandr Barouski – Dreamstime.com

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released new data from the 2020 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) showing a decline in youth use of e-cigarettes but an increase in use of disposable products.

    Compared to 2019, the number of youth using e-cigarettes is down 1.8 million. However, the number of youth using disposable e-cigarettes has risen: 26.5 percent of high school users are using disposables, up from 2.4 percent in 2019, and 15.2 percent of middle school users are using disposables, up from 3 percent last year.

    The use of flavored products is also high—more than eight out of 10 surveyed youth reported using flavored products. Fruit, mint, candy and menthol were the most commonly reported.

    This is the first year the NYTS has distinguished between mint and menthol. Previously, products were identified in the survey as “mint/menthol.”

    “After two years of disturbing increases in youth e-cigarette use, we are encouraged by the overall significant decline reported in 2020,” said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn. “This is good news; however, the FDA remains very concerned about the 3.6 million U.S. youth who currently use e-cigarettes and we acknowledge there is work that still needs to be done to curb youth use”