This article is part of a series from Medscape on vaping.
Every day, Sonia Sharma, PA, meets people like Natalie H., who is trying to quit vaping.
Natalie, a member of the nicotine addiction support group at the University of California San Francisco’s Fontana Tobacco Treatment Center, switched from traditional cigarettes to vaping but found the electronic version just as addictive and eventually decided to quit using nicotine completely.
“I went from being an occasional cigarette smoker, a few a month, to a daily vaper,” said Natalie, who preferred not to give her last name to protect her privacy. “Vaping made my nicotine addiction worse, not better.”
“We have people tell us they vape before their feet hit the ground in the morning,” said Sharma, who co-leads Natalie’s support group at UCSF. Sharma has met individuals who had smoked four to five cigarettes a day, switched to e-cigarettes to quit smoking, then vaped the equivalent of a pack a day. Others had switched to vapes to quit but ended up both vaping and smoking again. And others picked up vaping without ever smoking. They want to quit, she said, but are not sure how.
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health in 2020 reported that 5.6 million adults in the United States vaped. A little over 57% of people said they started using e-cigarettes to quit smoking traditional cigarettes. Another study in 2021 based on survey data found that about 60% of e-cigarette users wanted to quit their vaping habit.
Vaping has been marketed as a way to help people kick their smoking habit. Research is inconclusive on this claim. But unlike cessation tools like nicotine gums or lozenges, using vapes for cessation is uncharted territory. Vapers lack guidance on how to use the devices to quit, and they have even less direction on what to do if they develop an addiction to the vapes themselves.
A New Addiction?
Monica Hanna, MPH, assistant director of the Nicotine and Tobacco Recovery Program at RWJBarnabas Health’s Institute for Prevention and Recovery in New Jersey, said she has witnessed a higher level of nicotine addiction in the vapers with whom she has worked.
“When someone takes a hit from a vaping device, it doesn’t generate the burn it would from traditional tobacco,” Hanna said. “This causes people to take a deeper pull, and when they take a deeper pull, they establish a higher level of nicotine dependence over time.”
A 2019 study of nearly 900 people published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that smokers who used vapes for cessation were twice as likely to have quit smoking cigarettes than those who used other nicotine replacement therapy. However, 80% of people who switched to vaping were using e-cigarettes a year after they tried to quit smoking.
Source: Medscape
