Are E-Cigs Less Addictive Than Cigarettes?

E-cigarettes may be "healthier" than regular smoking, yet there's still much that's unknown about their long term effects. Now, recent findings show that they are less-addictive than regular cigarettes.

"We found that e-cigarettes appear to be less addictive than tobacco cigarettes in a large sample of long-term users," said Jonathan Foulds, professor of public health sciences and psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine, in a news release. 

The use of e-cigarettes has increase in the past five years, with over 400 brands of "e-cigs" to chose from.
For this study, researchers used an online survey to ask over 3,500 current e-cig users to assess their previous dependence on cigarettes and almost identical questions to assess current dependence on the products.

Though higher nicotine concentration in e-cig liquid was used of advanced and second-generation e-cigs, consumers who had used e-cigs longer appeared to be more addicted to the product than others.

"However, people with all the characteristics of a more dependent e-cig user still had a lower e-cig dependence score than their cigarette dependence score," Foulds said. "We think this is because they're getting less nicotine from the e-cigs than they were getting from cigarettes."

Although many regular users of e-cigarettes are trying to quit smoking, the Food and Drug Administration has not approved them for this use, and they cannot be marketed as a smoking cessation product.

"This is a new class of products that's not yet regulated," Foulds said. "It has the potential to do good and help a lot of people quit, but it also has the potential to do harm. Continuing to smoke and use e-cigarettes may not reduce health risks. Kids who have never smoked might begin nicotine addiction with e-cigs. There's a need for a better understanding of these products.

"We don't have long-term health data of e-cig use yet, but any common sense analysis says that e-cigs are much less toxic. And our paper shows that they appear to be much less addictive, as well. So in both measures they seem to have advantages when you're concerned about health."

Furthermore, study results hold interesting implications for developing e-cigs for smoking cessation-noting that the development of stronger e-cigarettes that more directly delivery nicotine can quickly can help people quit.

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