E-cigarettes no better than other stop-smoking tools, study says
Do electronic cigarettes help people quit? In a large study of company health programs, e-cigarettes worked no better than traditional stop-smoking tools — and the only thing that really helped was paying people to kick the habit.
Critics of the study say it doesn’t close the case on these popular vaping products. It didn’t rigorously test effectiveness, just compared e-cigarettes with other methods among 6,000 smokers who were offered help to quit.
Providing e-cigarettes “did not improve the number of people who quit compared to essentially doing nothing,” said Dr. Scott Halpern of the University of Pennsylvania. “The very best way to help them quit is to offer them money.” Halpern led the study, published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine. It was sponsored by the Vitality Group, which runs company health programs. The makers of NJOY e-cigarettes provided them, but had no role in the research.
E-cigarettes are batterypowered devices that vaporize nicotine. They contain less toxic substances than traditional cigarettes.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is mulling how to regulate them. This year, a national panel of experts said vaping might help people reduce smoking, but added that more research is needed.
The new study differed from usual studies of smokers wanting to quit. It automatically enrolled smokers in 54 company health programs and asked those who didn’t want to join to opt out. Only 125 did, but the vast majority of the rest didn’t actively participate yet their results were tracked as part of the study.
They were put into five groups: usual care, which was information on benefits of quitting and motivational text messages; free quitsmoking aids such as nicotine patches and medicines plus e-cigarettes if those failed; free e-cigarettes without any requirement to try other methods first; free quit-smoking aids and a $600 US reward if people were abstinent six months later; and free cessation tools plus $600 placed in an account at the start of the study that they’d lose if they didn’t quit.
Only 0.1 per cent in the usual care group succeeded. Rates ranged from 0.5 per cent to nearly three per cent for the rest. The groups offered cash did best. Rates among the other groups did not differ much from each other.
Success rates were higher — from 0.7 per cent to nearly 13 per cent — among 1,200 smokers who actively participated.
Average costs were less than $1 per participant in the usual care group and about $100 for those given redeemable cash accounts. But when looked at per successful quitter, the cash programs cost less than e-cigarettes or traditional methods.
Most big companies in the U.S. offer stop-smoking programs and half of them offer financial incentives, study leaders said. It costs companies $3,000 to $6,000 more per year to employ a smoker versus a non-smoker.