(Press-News.org) Persistence may be the key when quitting smoking using an electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS), commonly known as vaping, a University of Otago study found.
Researchers found people attempting to switch from cigarettes to ENDS reported highly varied smoking and ENDS use. They recommend people persist in their attempts to transition away from smoking, even if their progress feels slow and uncertain.
Lead author Associate Professor Tamlin Conner, of the Department of Psychology, says, although people may plan to use ENDS exclusively instead of cigarettes, making the switch is not always straightforward.
"We found that dual use of ENDS and cigarettes was very common, suggesting that people tested but had difficulty successfully substituting ENDS for smoking," she says.
For the study, published this month in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, the researchers recruited 45 people who wanted to quit smoking, gave each participant an ENDS device, and prompted participants to report their ENDS use and smoking each day for up to 20 weeks using a smartphone survey.
The researchers examined how participants' patterns of smoking and ENDS use changed over this extended period. The daily diary survey was part of a wider mixed qualitative and quantitative study of smoking to ENDS transitions funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund to Principal Investigator Professor Janet Hoek and her collaborators.
Aided by innovative data visualisations created by co-authors Dr Jimmy Zeng and Vicky He, the research team found considerable variety in how people used their ENDS.
The most common behaviour pattern was dual use of cigarettes and ENDS, then exclusive ENDS use and back to dual use. A smaller group reported moving from dual use to exclusive smoking, and often back to dual use. Another small group reported moving between abstinence and different ENDS use and smoking behaviours.
"Not any one person's journey to quit smoking is the same. Some people take up exclusive vaping relatively quickly in several weeks, others take longer from 12 - 20 weeks, or do not transition at all and continue smoking. People who wish to switch to exclusive vaping should view this variability as typical and should persevere in their efforts to switch," Associate Professor Conner says.
Professor Hoek believes this variability has implications for smoking cessation programmes.
"Classifying behaviours using point-prevalence categories, like achieving 'smoke free' status after 12 weeks, may be simplistic, especially during the early stages of an ENDS-assisted quit attempt. Cessation support programmes involving ENDS may need to run for longer than the conventional 12-weeks to ensure people have access to support during what could be an extended period of movement between smoking and ENDS use," she explains.
Associate Professor Conner also wanted to remind people that ENDS are not a risk-free alternative to smoking cigarettes.
"Although vaping can assist some people in quitting cigarettes, people should regard their use as a transition phase and aim to quit vaping when they think their risk of relapse back to smoking is very low."
INFORMATION:
A new quantitative study suggests people seeking asylum are more likely to experience mental health deterioration as they spend more time living in refugee camps, backing up qualitative evidence from aid organisations.
The research, co-authored by Dr Francisco Urzua from the Business School (formerly Cass) alongside practitioners from Moria Medical Support (MMS) and academics from Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile and University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands measured incidences of acute mental health crises arising from extended stays in the Moria refugee camp on ...
Researchers from the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King's College London have automated brain MRI image labelling, needed to teach machine learning image recognition models, by deriving important labels from radiology reports and accurately assigning them to the corresponding MRI examinations. Now, more than 100,00 MRI examinations can be labelled in less than half an hour.
Published in European Radiology, this is the first study allowing researchers to label complex MRI image datasets at scale.
The researchers say it would take years to manually perform labelling of more than 100,000 MRI examinations.
Deep learning typically requires tens of thousands of labelled images to ...
Scientists have developed a 'nanobody' - a small fragment of a llama antibody - that is capable of chasing out human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) as it hides away from the immune system. This then enables immune cells to seek out and destroy this potentially deadly virus.
Around four out of five people in the UK are thought to be infected with HCMV, and in developing countries this can be as high as 95%. For the majority of people, the virus remains dormant, hidden away inside white blood cells, where it can remain undisturbed and undetected for decades. ...
The research team of Prof. Xiaobo Ji and associate Prof. Guoqiang Zou has proposed an ingenious oxygen vacancy (OV)-engineering strategy to realize high content anionic doping in TiO2 and offered valuable insights into devise electrode materials with fast charge transfer kinetics in the bulk phase. The article titled "High content anion (S/Se/P) doping assisted by defect engineering with fast charge transfer kinetics for high-performance sodium ion capacitors" is published in Science Bulletin. Xinglan Deng is listed as first author and Prof. Guoqiang Zou as corresponding author.
The ...
An international research team has come up with an innovative method for metal recovery from industrial waste. The new method allows the simultaneous recovery of multiple metals from waste oxides in a single process. This novel route will lower the burden on waste storage facilities with significant contributions to the economic and environmental sustainability of industrial waste management. The study was published in Journal of Environmental Management. This work is the first in a series of studies aimed at developing cost-effective and environmentally sustainable solutions for industrial waste recycling.
Some of the major industries ...
Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, astronomers have unambiguously detected the presence of a disc around a planet outside our Solar System for the first time. The observations will shed new light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
"Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which satellites could be forming," says Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the University of Grenoble, France, and at the University of Chile, who led the new research published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify ...
Cambridge, MA ¬- Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have helped detect the clear presence of a moon-forming region around an exoplanet -- a planet outside of our Solar System. The new observations, published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, may shed light on how moons and planets form in young stellar systems.
The detected region is known as a circumplanetary disk, a ring-shaped area surrounding a planet where moons and other satellites may form. The observed disk surrounds exoplanet PDS 70c, one of two giant, Jupiter-like planets orbiting a star nearly 400 light-years away. Astronomers had found hints of a "moon-forming" disk around this exoplanet before but since ...
Participation in elite adult rugby may be associated with changes in brain structure.
This is the finding of a study of 44 elite rugby players, almost half of whom had recently sustained a mild head injury while playing.
The study, part of the Drake Rugby Biomarker Study, was led by Imperial College London and published in the journal Brain Communications.
The research found a significant proportion of the rugby players had signs of abnormalities to the white matter, in addition to abnormal changes in white matter volume over time.
White matter is the 'wiring' of the brain, and helps brain cells communicate with each other. The research team say more work is now needed to investigate the long-term effects of professional rugby on brain health.
Professor David Sharp, senior author ...
Adults and children with COVID-19 who have a history of malnutrition may have an increased likelihood of death and the need for mechanical ventilation, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.
Malnutrition hampers the proper functioning of the immune system and is known to increase the risk of severe infections for other viruses, but the potential long-term effects of malnutrition on COVID-19 outcomes are less clear.
Louis Ehwerhemuepha and colleagues investigated associations between malnutrition diagnoses and subsequent COVID-19 severity, using medical records for 8,604 children and 94,495 adults (older than 18 years) who were hospitalised with COVID-19 in the United States between March and June 2020. Patients with a diagnosis ...
A new study published online today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute reports that one third of the most popular cancer treatment articles on social media contain misinformation. Further, the vast majority of that misinformation has the potential to harm cancer patients by supporting approaches that could negatively impact the quality of their treatment and chances for survival. The study also showed that articles containing misinformation garner more attention and engagement than articles with evidence-based information.
The internet is a major source for health information, and misinformation is growing among many types of health conditions. This is an urgent challenge because it can result in patients making ...