The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products and the National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse announced the availability and location of newly released and updated data files from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, including the following:
The Wave 5.5 Special Collection data were collected from youth participants ages 13 to 19 between July and December 2020. Data in the PATH-ATS were collected between September and December 2020 from a subsample of adult participants ages 20 and older, complementing the Wave 5.5 Special Collection. Additionally, Restricted-Use Files have been updated to include Wave 5 Ever/Never Reference Data, and the Restricted-Use and Public-Use Master Linkage Files have been updated.
Questions about the collection, content, weighting, documentation, or structure of PATH Study data (this excludes questions on statistical analysis or analytic guidance) may be submitted to PATHDataUserQuestions@Westat.com.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is encouraging researchers to access recently published numbers on tobacco consumption.
In March, the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, together with the National Institutes of Health, released the first set of widely available Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study tables and figures that provide information on tobacco use among youth (aged 12-17), young adults (aged 18-24), and adults (aged 25+).
The content, which is available for public use, may be downloaded from the PATH Study webpage, which also provides information about the analytic methods used to generate the tables and figures.
The PATH Study is a uniquely large, long-term study of tobacco use and health in the United States. By following study participants over time, the PATH Study helps scientists learn how and why people start using tobacco, quit using it, and start using it again after they’ve quit, as well as how different tobacco products affect health over time.
A new study claims that those using e-cigarettes to quit smoking found them to be less helpful than more traditional smoking cessations aids such as patches and gum.
The study, published Monday in the journal BMJ, analyzed the latest 2017 to 2019 data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, which follows tobacco use among Americans over time.
“This is the first time we found e-cigarettes to be less popular than FDA-approved pharmaceutical aids, such as medications or the use of patches, gum, or lozenges,” said John Pierce, the director for population sciences at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, according to CNN.
A three-month randomized trial in the United Kingdom, published in 2019, found e-cigarettes, along with behavioral interventions, did help smokers quit tobacco cigarettes. In guidance published in late 2021, the UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence decided to recommend that smokers use e-cigarettes to help them quit.
Another recent study, published in JAMA Network Open, found adult smokers with no plans to quit are more likely to stop smoking if they switch to daily vaping, according to new research led by Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The Roswell Park study also used data collected from 2014 to 2019 as part of the PATH study.
A new study shows that teens who vape pot are more likely to wheeze and cough than those who smoke cigarettes or vape nicotine. Appearing in the March 3 Journal of Adolescent Health, the study found that U.S. youth aged 12 to 17 show they have a higher risk of wheezing, suffering from a dry cough and having their sleep, speech or exercise impeded by wheezing if they vape marijuana products.
Credit: Clear Cannabis
The results are from the U.S. federally funded Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study. It states that all symptoms are strongly related to lung injury, and it’s unclear how long they will last, said lead researcher Carol Boyd, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health.
“We found, and it was something that surprised us a bit, that it was the lifetime vaping cannabis that was associated with a far greater number of symptoms and a higher likelihood of having each of these symptoms than using either e-cigarettes or cigarettes,” Boyd said. “Lifetime” referred to any past use.
Survey responses from nearly 15,000 teens showed that vaping pot increased their risk of wheezing or whistling in the chest by 81 percent compared with a 15 percent increased risk from cigarettes and a 9 percent increased risk from nicotine e-cigarettes.
Vaping pot also increased teens’ risk of:
Sleep disturbed by wheezing by 71 percent;
Speech limited due to wheezing by 96 percent;
Wheezing during or after exercise by 33 percent; and
Dry coughing at night by 26 percent.
Smoking and nicotine e-cigarette use also increased risks for these indications of lung injury, just not by as much, Boyd said, according to an article on usnews.com.
“I think that industry would probably like to show that vaping e-cigarettes is healthier, that it’s the cannabis vaping causing these respiratory symptoms not the e-cigarettes. This is not true. E-cigarette vaping also causes symptoms among youth,” Boyd said. “However, in our study, and when we took into account their e-cigarette use, we found higher odds of having these respiratory symptoms among youth who had vaped cannabis.”
The survey was taken between December 2016 and January 2018—prior to the wave of lung injuries among young people that occurred in 2019. It was given the name EVALI, or e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury.
Boyd thinks some of these lung problems reported in the survey were probably due to EVALI, which has been linked to pot-laced e-liquids and particularly those containing vitamin E acetate. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), four out of five patients with EVALI had vaped cannabis versus only about 16 percent who said they only vaped nicotine.
The CDC has stated that vitamin E acetate was found in the lung fluid of all patients with EVALI.
A new study suggests that vaping reduces inflammatory biomarkers when to compared to someone who smokes combustible cigarettes. “While vaping inflammatory biomarkers were elevated compared to nonusers, those differences were not statistically significant,” the study’s authors state.
“There was also no significant difference in the elevation of biomarkers between the exclusive smokers and dual smokers – the additive effect of e-cigarettes was low if present at all.”
The research, reported in the journal Circulation, used the U.S. For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) that has been released yearly since 2013.
The dataset is from this first cycle using data of participants’ smoking habits along with blood samples. The researchers looked specifically at metabolites, biomarkers, of inflammation and oxidative stress – the culprits felt to underlie tobacco’s harmful effects. In addition to the usual demographic data, there was specific information on the use or nonuse of tobacco, vaping, and cigarette smoking.
Results reflect findings for adults age 18 or older, where data on biomarkers and tobacco use were available, which was 7130 participants. This included 58.6 percent neither smoked nor used e-cigarettes (nonusers); 29.6 percent smoked exclusively; 1.9 percent vaped exclusively and 9.9 percent smoked and vaped (dual users).
“Exclusive and dual smokers had the highest inflammatory and oxidative stress biomarkers relative to nonusers,” the researchers note. “Exclusive vapers had ‘significantly lower levels’ except for C-reactive protein (than smokers).”
The research concluded that e-cigarettes appear to have little impact on inflammatory biomarkers, certainly not as great as smoking tobacco. This research “highlight(s) the importance of completely replacing cigarette smoking with e-cigarettes or quitting the use of both products for cigarette smokers to derive potential health benefits,” the report states.
Adolescent cigarette smoking has declined over the past several decades, e-cigarette use presents a new risk for nicotine use disorder, according to a new study. Published Nov. 9 in the journal Pediatrics, the new research suggests that e-cigarette use is associated with a higher risk of cigarette smoking among adolescents who had no prior intention of taking up conventional smoking.
“Research is showing us that adolescent e-cigarette users who progress to cigarette smoking are not simply those who would have ended up smoking cigarette anyway,” says Olusegun Owotomo, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., the study’s lead author and a pediatric resident at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC. “Our study shows that e-cigarettes can predispose adolescents to cigarette smoking, even when they have no prior intentions to do so.”
The study uses data collected by the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study, an NIH and FDA collaborative nationally representative prospective cohort study of tobacco use, from 2014-2016. A more recent PATH study has shown the rate of youth e-cigarette use is declining.
Among adolescents who did not intend to smoke cigarettes in the future, those who used e-cigarettes were more than four times more likely to start smoking cigarettes one year later compared to those who did not use e-cigarettes.
