Vapes were found to be the most effective aid for helping people quit smoking in eight out of 11 scientific studies, a major new review has found.
In the remaining three studies, vapes were found to be equally as effective as other methods or no treatment - and no studies concluded they were less successful.
Researchers at the University of Catania in Italy conducted the first-ever umbrella review of studies comparing the effectiveness of vapes to other approaches at helping adult smokers to quit the deadly habit.
The review, published in the international journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, said: “Electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), known as e-cigarettes or more commonly called vapes, have been proposed as a smoking cessation strategy and tested in randomised controlled trials for over a decade..
“Unfortunately, this field of research is highly contested.. In 2021 sixteen former presidents of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, the premier research society in this field, stated that public health was not paying serious attention to the potential benefits of ENDS for cessation..
“Three years later, nothing has changed. Debate often overshadows the evidence that e-cigarettes can be used as smoking cessation tools” (Rigotti, 2024).”
Bringing “clarity to this debate”
The researchers, from the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR), said they conducted an umbrella review - also known as a review of reviews - in an effort to “bring clarity to this debate.”
They said: “Presenting data from multiple experts in the field should address concerns over one-sided stances on ENDS use.. Our research question is explicitly directed to the ongoing debate: are ENDS more, less, or equally effective compared to other smoking cessation treatments or approaches?”
The team analysed findings from 24 randomised controlled trials across eight high quality reviews. These were all published between January 2021 and April 2023.
The review concluded: “Our analysis indicated that e-cigarettes are more effective than other treatments for smoking cessation. For ENDS compared solely to NRT (Nicotine Replacement Therapy), the evidence was mixed and still favoured the effectiveness of ENDS.
“In any case, the success rates for cessation with ENDS was 10 to 12 per cent at six months to one year, and the effect of relapse has not been sufficiently studied.”
Reporting biases
Although the results of the umbrella review are promising, it also uncovered issues with reporting biases.
It said: “For the systematic reviews, biases and errors in reporting in all but one.. reduces our confidence in the analyses, even though all of the reviews achieved acceptable methodological quality. Methodological quality did not guarantee robust reporting in the reviews.”
The review comes after a UK survey earlier this year found vaping has been the most successful aid to people quitting smoking over the last five years.
The poll from health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) found that 5.6 million adults in the UK use vapes. Of these, a massive 53 per cent said they had stopped smoking, 39 per cent are still smoking and eight per cent have never smoked.
The survey also uncovered high levels of public misperceptions about vaping. It showed that half of adults believe vaping is as or more harmful than smoking - when it is in fact significantly less harmful.
Meanwhile a study in the U.S. found more than half of adults who successfully quit smoking used vapes or other nicotine products to kick the habit.
The research, preprinted in science journal BMJ Yale, showed that 2.9 million U.S. adults stopped smoking for six months or longer from 2021 through 2022.
In the same period, 13.1 million tried to stop but went back to smoking. Among those who successfully quit, 53.9 per cent (1.5 million U.S adults) said they primarily used vapes alone or in combination with other methods.
