A British study conducted by Mark Conner from the Leeds University recently challenged the benefits of vaping: young people could be tempted to start smoking if they had previously been vaping. We had talked about this in one of our previous articles, there are still some heated discussions about the link between youth vaping and youth smoking.

What does this new study tell us?

Two groups of teenagers were formed:

• those who had tried vaping but who hadn’t tried smoking
• those who had never smoked nor vaped

A year after, searchers have asked the teenagers if they had smoked a cigarette during the past year. 34.4% of the teenagers who had already vaped confessed they had tried smoking. On the contrary, among the teens who had never smoked nor vaped, only 9% lit their first cigarette.

If you simply look at the figures, you might conclude that when young people vape, they have higher risks to start smoking. But this is actually not true: if you look at tobacco use in Great Britain, it has decreased while e-cigarette use increased.

For University College London health psychology professor Robert West and for University of Stirling health policy professor Linda Bauld, this study doesn’t show in any way that e-cigarettes lead to tobacco cigarettes. This simply shows that some young people who have tried vaping can also be curious about tobacco cigarettes, and it could be for just one time.

If vaping led to smoking, the latest national studies would show a steady increase of tobacco use among the youth. But it’s the contrary that’s taking place in Great Britain, and we are rather pleased to see the figures evolve in such a way.

The international scientific community is still debating about the pros and cons of electronic cigarettes. Searchers are not only working on the link between vaping and smoking but are also focused on a comparison of health risks between tobacco and e-cigarettes.

Regarding this latter point, the debate seems almost peaceful: for most of the scientists, it is obvious that e-cigarettes represent a safer alternative to tobacco products. Indeed, the vapor produced by electronic cigarettes contains no toxic substances, therefore cardiovascular diseases, cancer risks and bronchitis linked to tar and carbon monoxyde disappear.