E-cigarettes disappoint in quit-smoking study

It’s a big question for smokers and policymakers alike: Do electronic cigarettes help people quit? In a large study of company wellness programs, e-cigarettes worked no better than traditional stop-smoking tools, and the only thing that really helped was paying folks 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 to other methods among 6,000 smokers who were offered help to quit. That’s still valuable information because it’s what happens in daily life.

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.”

He led the study, published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine .It was sponsored by the Vitality Group, which runs company wellness programs. The makers of NJOY e-cigarettes provided them but had no role in the research.

E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that vaporize nicotine. They’ve been sold in the U.S. since 2007 and contain less toxic substances than traditional cigarettes. The Food and Drug Administration is mulling how to regulate them, and earlier this year, a national panel of experts said vaping may help folks reduce smoking but that more research is needed.

The new study differed from usual studies of smokers wanting to quit: It automatically enrolled smokers in 54 company wellness 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 quit-smoking aids such as nicotine patches and medicines like Chantix or Zyban plus e-cigarettes if those failed; free e-cigarettes without any requirement to try other methods first; free quit-smoking aids and a $600 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.

The results: Only 0.1 percent in the usual care group succeeded; rates ranged from 0.5 percent to nearly 3 percent for the rest. The groups offered cash did best; rates among the other groups did not differ much from each other.