August 8, 2017 – E-cig Benefits?

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Anchor lead: Do e-cigarettes lead to attempts to quit cigarettes altogether? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Smoking cessation rates in the US have increased, federal data reported recently show, with some attributing the switch to e-cigarettes as a major contributing factor. Yet many questions about the purported benefits of e-cigarettes remain. That’s according to Enid Neptune, a lung expert at Johns Hopkins.

Neptune: We’ll see a lot of correlation that can show that e-cigs are good or that e-cigs are bad. But what we want to know about are behaviors, we want to know about doses, we want to know about dual use, durable cessation versus short term cessation, how long people continue to use e-cigarettes after they’ve stopped or after they’ve reduced their conventional cigarette use. And we want to know the partitioning across different age groups.  :29

Neptune says so-called ‘harm reduction’ is not a persuasive argument for using any tobacco product on a regular basis. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.