British teenagers who vape today are just as likely to start smoking tobacco as young people growing up in the 1970s, new research has found.
A long-term study found that teenagers who vape now are 33 per cent more likely to take up tobacco compared to those who don’t, despite decades of falling smoking rates.
The study, published in the journal Tobacco Control, showed a decline in teenage smoking prevalence, falling from 33 per cent in 1974 to 25 per cent in 1986, and to 12 per cent in 2018.
This is due to tougher tobacco control laws and a greater awareness of smoking’s dangers, the researchers said.
However, the research also revealed that among today’s teens, those who vape remain just as likely to smoke cigarettes as their peers half a century ago.
The study, led by the University of Michigan, found that only around 1.5 per cent of non-vaping 17-year-olds reported current smoking, compared with 33 per cent of those who currently vaped.
“This probability is especially concerning given the recent increases in e-cigarette use prevalence among UK youth, despite some initial assurances that e-cigarettes would have little appeal to [them],” the researchers said.
In the UK, an estimated 1.1 million young people between the ages of 11 and 17 vape and 100,000 smoke, according to figures from Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).
The researchers analysed intergenerational data from three major British cohort studies – the 1958 National Child Development Study, the 1970 British Cohort Study, and the 2001 Millennium Cohort Study.
The researchers looked at several risk factors that can influence teen smoking. This includes early alcohol use, parental smoking, mothers’ education, and children’s engagement with school.
They found that some of these factors have changed over time, such as parental smoking rates, which have dropped from more than 70 per cent in the 1970s cohort to 27 per cent among the most recent group.
Despite these changes, vaping appears to undermine progress, the researchers said. They found that among current teen vapers, the likelihood of also smoking cigarettes has effectively reversed the declining trend.
“Youth who had never used e-cigarettes had an estimated less than one in 50 chance of reporting weekly cigarette use at age 17, while those who had previously used e-cigarettes had over a one in 10 chance,” the researchers said.
“Youth who reported current e-cigarette use had an almost one in three chance of also reporting current cigarette use.”
The study’s authors cautioned that the findings do not prove vaping directly causes smoking. However, they warned that efforts to reduce smoking among young people must now also address vaping.
“Among contemporary youth, efforts to reduce cigarette smoking should focus both on those who are currently using e-cigarettes and on the prevention of e-cigarette use among youth, to maintain the promising declines in youth nicotine use in years to come,” they concluded.
A ban on disposable vapes came into force in the UK at the beginning of June as the government attempts to crack down on youth nicotine addiction as well as the litter the single-use devices create.
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