(Press-News.org) A new study, co-led by a University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher, set out to identify the most effective strategies for helping people quit vaping. The findings, published today in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, suggest that varenicline, a prescription medication often used to help people stop smoking, and text message-based interventions can help people quit.
“This is an area of research that is in its infancy, but is growing rapidly and organically from people who vape asking about help to quit vaping,” says senior author Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, assistant professor of health policy and management in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and a Cochrane editor. “We also know that people who use vaping as a way to transition away from smoking are often keen to know how they can safely transition away from vaping without relapsing to smoking, which is really important.”
Cochrane reviews have found “high certainty evidence” that e-cigarettes lead to better chances of quitting smoking than patches, gums, lozenges or other traditional nicotine replacement therapy.
Other individuals, particularly young people who have never smoked, begin vaping and may face health risks or develop a dependency on nicotine and wish to quit vaping.
In the quit-vaping review, the team of scientists, including co-lead authors Nicola Lindson and Ailsa Butler at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, pinpointed nine relevant randomized studies involving more than 5,000 participants. The researchers aimed to evaluate and assess the effectiveness of tools that have been tested to help individuals quit vaping.
“The interventions tested are similar to those that we know work for helping people quit smoking,” Hartmann-Boyce says. “We don’t know, however, that they necessarily help people quit vaping, and that’s why it’s important that we have these trials.”
The study found that programs designed to deliver support via text messages seem to be effective for young people aged 13 to 24. The prescription medication varenicline, commonly used to help people stop smoking, was potentially effective for adults trying to quit vaping. However, due to the limited number of studies, this evidence for both approaches was low certainty and, the researchers explain, needs to be investigated further.
“With the results of our Cochrane review, healthcare professionals now have initial evidence for specific approaches they can recommend, particularly for younger people wanting to quit vaping,” Butler says. “However, we urgently need more research to explore these and other approaches.”
The text-message approach offers a mix of motivational content, as well as content around social norms and tips for ways to quit vaping. “I think it’s clear that this approach helps young people,” Hartmann-Boyce says. “The question is, is it going to help other populations?”
Hartmann-Boyce says more relevant studies are underway, and the issue will remain high priority with Cochrane. “This is a really early area of research,” she says. “This is a living, systematic review, and we’ll be searching for new evidence monthly and updating the review as it comes out, because we know that this research is evolving.”
END
Regular physical activity before a cancer diagnosis may lower the risks of both disease progression and death, suggests research published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
And even relatively low levels of physical activity may be advantageous, the findings indicate.
There is compelling evidence that physical activity has a key part to play in lowering the risk of death from cancer, but the evidence isn’t as conclusive for its role in disease progression, explain the researchers.
To explore this further, they analysed anonymised data from the Discovery Health Medical Scheme (DHMS), linked to the Vitality health promotion programme. The DHMS is the ...
Basking too long in a sauna may put bathers at risk of heat stroke, particularly if they haven’t drunk enough water beforehand, warn doctors in the journal BMJ Case Reports, after treating a woman whose condition required admission to hospital.
Although relatively rare, heat stroke can be life threatening, even in the absence of various underlying risk factors, such as heart, lung, or neurological disease, and heavy drinking or taking a cocktail of prescription meds, they point out.
Heat stroke is defined as a sharp increase in core body temperature above ...
A new study from the University of Adelaide and The Australian National University (ANU) has outlined the first genomic evidence of early migration from New Guinea into the Wallacea, an archipelago containing Timor-Leste and hundreds of inhabited eastern Indonesian islands.
The study, published in PNAS, addresses major gaps in the human genetic history of the Wallacean Archipelago and West Papuan regions of Indonesia – a region with abundant genetic and linguistic diversity that is comparable to the Eurasian ...
Children and young people with high levels of mental health needs are struggling to receive the help they need, or to have their difficulties recognised, according to a new study.
The STADIA trial, which is published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, was led by experts from the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham, and was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
The large study, which spans different parts of England, involved 1,225 children and young people with emotional difficulties who had been referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) for help, and followed them up over 18 months to see ...
MADISON — How and when did dinosaurs first emerge and spread across the planet more than 200 million years ago? That question has for decades been a source of debate among paleontologists faced with fragmented fossil records. The mainstream view has held that the reptiles emerged on the southern portion of the ancient supercontinent Pangea called Gondwana millions of years before spreading to the northern half named Laurasia.
But now, a newly described dinosaur whose fossils were uncovered by University of Wisconsin–Madison paleontologists is challenging ...
-With images-
Scientists at Durham University have developed a theoretical framework to predict the efficacy of quenching of electrical pulses in excitable media, such as those found in the human heart.
This breakthrough could significantly accelerate the development of more efficient defibrillation techniques for treating cardiac arrhythmias.
The study, published in Physical Review E, addresses a longstanding challenge in understanding how stable excitation waves in systems like cardiac tissue can be effectively neutralised through small changes.
These electrical waves, when irregular, are thought to underly serious conditions such as fibrillation, ...
Around the globe day and night, the microelectronics behind much of modern technology help run computers, medical devices and state-of-the-art instruments that power scientific discoveries. But all of that technology consumes energy, and adding artificial intelligence to the mix increases our energy needs dramatically. Some experts caution that this pace of energy usage is unsustainable.
To tackle this challenge, the Department of Energy (DOE) has announced funding $179 million for three Microelectronics ...
Researchers from Southern Methodist University and University of Michigan published a new Journal of Marketing study that examines platforms’ A-B testing of online ads and uncovers significant limitations that can create misleading conclusions about ad performance.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Where A-B Testing Goes Wrong: How Divergent Delivery Affects What Online Experiments Cannot (and Can) Tell You About How Customers Respond to Advertising” and is authored by Michael Braun and Eric M. Schwartz.
Consider a landscaping company whose designs focus ...
A recent study analyzing data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) found that past-year recreational ketamine use among adults has increased dramatically since 2015, including significant shifts in associations with depression and sociodemographic characteristics such as race, age and education status. Ketamine use has shown promise in clinical trials therapy for several mental illnesses, including treatment-resistant depression, and the new research suggests that ongoing monitoring of recreational use trends is crucial to balancing these ...
A study of Chinese agriculture recommends planting areas currently growing maize and rapeseed with alternative crops to reduce environmental costs while maximizing food production as the climate changes.
Chinese food production has nearly doubled since the 1980s, mainly thanks to intensified nutrient usage and irrigation. Given that China’s demand for food is forecast to increase further, Qi Guan and colleagues modeled the country’s agricultural system under varying climate change scenarios in the 21st century, using a dynamic global vegetation model. The authors created scenarios ...
