Vapers do not undermine desire to quit smoking

Smokers who regularly spend time with vapers (people who use e-cigarettes) are more likely to try quitting smoking, according to a new study carried out by UCL. The research, published today in BMC Medicine and funded by Cancer Research UK, found that smokers who were regularly exposed to vapers (as opposed to other smokers) were around 20% more likely to have reported both a high current motivation to quit and made a recent quit attempt. "It is becoming increasingly more commonplace for smokers to come into contact with vapers and some concerns have been raised that this could 'renormalise' smoking in England and undermine smokers' motivation to quit," said the study's lead author, Dr Sarah Jackson (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care). "Our results found no evidence that spending time with vapers discourages smokers from quitting, which should help to alleviate concerns about the wider public health impact of e-cigarettes." Around a quarter (25.8%) of smokers in the study said they regularly spent time with vapers. Of these, around a third (32.3%) had made an attempt to quit smoking in the previous year - a higher rate than was observed among smokers who did not regularly spend time with vapers (26.8%). "A key factor driving these differences may be that smokers who are regularly exposed to e-cigarette use by others are more likely to use e-cigarettes themselves. When smokers' own use of e-cigarettes was taken into account, exposure to other people using e-cigarettes appeared to have little impact on how motivated smokers were to stop, and whether they made a recent quit attempt," explained Dr Jackson.