"Your work in developing the Health Related Behaviour Survey was ground breaking and has continued to evolve." Tribute from a Director of Public Health to John Balding, presented at his retirement lunch, May 2005
Cause and effect with vaping and smoking
Cause and effect with vaping and smoking
Browsing through my colleague David McGeorge's latest round-up of research into young people and health (https://sheu.org.uk/resl), I came across a paper about how e-cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes may be adopted by young people (https://sheu.org.uk/content/how-effect-adolescent-e-cigarette-use-smokin...).
The message from the manufacturers has been that e-cigarettes are intended only to help adult smokers of tobacco cigarettes to quit. Nonetheless, there have been concerns that e-cigarettes are being adopted by young people who don't use tobacco cigarettes, and might even be a route to trying tobacco cigarettes later. This has now been shown to happen, and this latest research is a contribution to our understanding of how this works in at least one group of young people.
What can we learn from SHEU surveys?
A question that we have tried in a couple of local authority surveys is this one:
11. Have you ever tried vaping or smoking?
Vaping - includes using an electronic cigarette, e-cig, shisha pen, hookah pen
Smoking - includes roll-ups & ready-made cigarettes.
Please select one answer(_) Both
(_) Smoking
(_) Vaping
(_) Neither(and if they answer Both...)
12. Smoking and Vaping: Which did you try first?
(_) Vaping
(_) Smoking
(_) I tried smoking and vaping at about the same time
(_) I don't remember
This relies on self-report and memory, so is not as good as a longitudinal study of the sort we have just seen, but the answers are interesting nonetheless.
The results looked like this:
| Vaping first | Smoking first | I tried smoking and vaping at about the same time |
Other responses/ missing |
||
| Area 1 | Year 8 | 20% | 44% | 7% | 29% |
| Year 10 | 22% | 59% | 7% | 11% | |
| Area 2 | Year 8 | 45% | 12% | 0% | 43% |
| Year 10 | 49% | 22% | 4% | 25% |
The mix of causes and effects and possible pathways cannot be shown here, but some important points are:
- where a student has used both e-cigarettes and tobacco, vaping can precede tobacco use (both areas)
- vaping can precede tobacco use more often than the other way around (area 2 only)
- young people in different communities may have very different patterns of adoption
Post date:
07 June 2018 11:54