“A serious methodological problem”: Academics & UKVIA Criticise New Vaping Study By George Washington University

A recently published vaping study by George Washington University (GWU) in the USA has been heavily criticised for ‘flawed research’ which suggested that e-cigarettes and vapes, known as ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery systems) “did not contribute to substantial smoking cessation at the population level.”

The study focussed on so-called ‘dual users’, those who both smoke cigarettes and vape, but did not take into account vapers who had stopped smoking.

The study’s findings go against years of evidence that vaping is helping smokers to quit by providing a 95% safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, particularly in the UK where four million people already vape. The rise of vaping has been linked by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to the UK’s smoking rate dropping to just 13.3%, the lowest on record.

The study “does not assess whether vaping helps smokers to quit.”

Experts including Prof John Britton at the University of Nottingham, Dr Sarah Jackson at University College London, and Prof Peter Hajek, at Queen Mary University of London, have heavily criticised the report, with Jackson suggesting that the study “does not assess whether vaping helps smokers to quit.”

Prof Britton, who is the Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham, said that: “The design of this study selects people who find it hard to quit, or don’t want to. In that context the good news is that some at least manage it.

“What the study can’t tell us is whether more smokers who become dual users manage to quit than smokers who do not.

Dr Jackson, the Principal Research Fellow of the UCL Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group, added “If we want to know whether vaping helps people to stop smoking, we need to look at differences in quit rates between smokers who vape and smokers who don’t vape”, said Jackson.

The GWU study led to a headline in the Daily Mail titled “Vapes DON’T help people quit normal cigarettes, study finds”. This was published just seven days after the Daily Mail published another article titled “How UK’s ditched cigs and turned to vaping”.

“There is little wonder that smokers are confused when they are up against mixed messaging like this” said the Director General of the UK Vaping Industry Association (UKVIA), John Dunne.

“…if anyone really has any doubt whether vaping actually does help people quit cigarettes, then they can ask any one of the country’s four million vapers what they think!”

A “serious methodological problem”

Other academics have joined the criticism of the vaping study, including Prof Robert West who is the Professor Emeritus of Health Psychology at UCL, who found it “surprising to see such a claim being made by a serious scientific journal.”

“This study cannot address the issue of whether vaping e-cigarettes helps or hinders smoking cessation at a population level, however tentatively such a conclusion may be phrased – so it is surprising to see such a claim being made by a serious scientific journal.

“Well-conducted population-level studies have found that people who use e-cigarettes when trying to quit smoking are more likely to succeed, and that increased use of e-cigarettes over time in the population has been associated with an increase in cessation rates.

“It is like removing the best apples from a fertilised orchard and measuring what is left”

Prof Hajek, who is the Director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit, Queen Mary University of London, suggested that the study had “a serious methodological problem”.

“There is a serious methodological problem in excluding smokers who switched completely to vaping, and only assessing the efficacy of vaping for smoking cessation on those who became dual users. It is like removing the best apples from a fertilised orchard, measuring what is left, and declaring that fertilisation had no effect.

“The press release by Tobacco Control is particularly misleading. It claims that dual use is harmful, when actually it is associated with reduced smoking and later quitting and so it is in fact beneficial. It also asserts that the study found that vaping doesn’t help smokers quit more easily, when the paper makes no such claim.”