E-Cigarettes Are One Of The Most Effective Products For Smoking Cessation

Many people start smoking electronic cigarettes in conjunction with their normal tobacco cigarettes. Over some period of time they decrease their daily quota of tobacco cigarettes reducing them to a relatively harmless proportion. At the end they stop taking tobacco cigarettes and feel content with e-cigarettes.

Many people who smoked for over 20 years and are tobacco-free now praised e-cigarettes as an important and potent way of smoking cessation. However, much work has to still be done over the reliable usage of e-cigarettes as the aids for smoking cessation. The FDA hasn’t yet approved its use as a standard measure. The fact that e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco renders them free of any strict legislation by the authorities and thus makes them potentially dangerous to minors who might use them.

The British Medical association also supports that there is potential evidence of smoking cessation with e-cigarettes but there are concerns that e-cigarettes are less well regulated in terms of use as compared to the conventional nicotine replacement therapies.

The American Medical Association grades electronic cigarettes quite similar to the other conventional nicotine replacement administrations and supports them as a harm reduction method for the people who have failed to quit smoking by other methods.

Comparative effectiveness of e-cigarettes and nicotine patches

The solid scientific data backing the benefits of e-cigarettes are still insufficient too. The recently published results of clinical trial comparing e-cigarettes and nicotine patches helped to fill this gap in the knowledge.

Scientists from the University of Auckland in New Zealand compared the efficiency of e-cigarettes and patches in helping people to stop smoking or in the reduction of the number of cigarettes smoked. They found that 7.3% of people using e-cigarettes quit the smoking after 6 months. This is low, but still this represents a better success rate in comparison with the users of nicotine patches among whom the rate of cessation was just 5.8%.

A comprehensive analysis by the University of Oxford and the University of Leicester, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, found nicotine e-cigarettes, varenicline, and cytisine to be the most effective options for helping smokers quit long-term​​. The study synthesized data from over 300 clinical trials involving more than 150,000 people, providing a robust view of the relative effectiveness of different smoking cessation methods​.

The research showed that e-cigarettes helped approximately 14 smokers per 100 quit long-term, a rate higher than those trying to quit without any aids. This was found to be similar to the effectiveness of varenicline and cytisine, but more effective than using a single form of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). Using two forms of NRT together, such as a patch and gum, was almost as effective as e-cigarettes.

Read More: Teen Use of E-Cigarettes Doubles In US in Just One Year

Many former smokers admit that quitting smoking is easier these days. Compared to not such a distant past, we now have the large arsenal of aids that can help in fighting the addiction. E-cigarettes, the popular option for those who decided to quit smoking, are now confirmed to be at least as efficient as nicotine patches. The use of e-cigarettes helps to substantially reduce the number of smoked cigarettes. In the long term, this has a potential of saving many lives from smoking related diseases.