Health: young people who smoke are three times more likely to become daily smokers

Starting smoking increases the likelihood of young people smoking traditional cigarettes daily three times, a study warned.

American researchers studied data on the evolution of the use of tobacco products in more than 49,000 young people aged 12 to 24 years in four years.

The team found that – among those who experimented with tobacco use – the number of daily users increased with age up to 28 years.

In fact, the percentage of daily cigarette smokers almost doubled between 18-21 years old (by 12 percent) and 25-28 years old (by 21 percent).

Try tobacco at a younger age and try various products – cigarettes, cigars, pipes, etc. – increases the risk of addiction, the researchers said.

“Electronic cigarettes are a gateway for those who become daily smokers,” said newspaper author and oncologist John Pierce of the University of California at San Diego.

“The initial product has changed from cigarettes to e-cigarettes, but the final product has remained the same.”

“When users become addicted to nicotine, they are converting to smoking,” he added.

In their study, Professor Pierce and colleagues analyzed data collected by the so-called Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study, which recruited more than 49,000 young people aged 12 to 24 in the United States between 2013-2014.

Each participant was interviewed annually for four years to explore how the use of different tobacco products can progress from experimentation to daily use.

In the first year of the study, 45 percent of respondents reported having used at least one tobacco product in their lifetime – a number that rose to 62 percent in the fourth year of annual surveys.

Of the participants who tried tobacco, 73 percent reported trying cigarettes and 72 percent tried steam.

Meanwhile, more than half said they had experimented with cigarillos or hookahs – while just over 10 percent tried pipes, traditional or filtered cigars and smokeless products like chewing tobacco or snus.

The team found that only one percent of those who tried a single tobacco product progressed to smoking cigarettes daily – but that number rose to 15 percent among those who tried five or more different forms of tobacco.

In the four years of the study, 12 percent of respondents were using tobacco products daily – with half having become daily users after the first year.

Of these, 70 percent smoked cigarettes daily – with the majority, at 63 percent, using cigarettes exclusively, while half of those who smoked together with another tobacco product vaporized electronic cigarettes on a non-daily basis.

The team found that of the 17 percent of daily tobacco users in the study who smoked daily, almost half also smoked non-daily.

More research is needed to determine whether these young daily smokers will continue to smoke both traditional and electronic cigarettes, or whether they will end up opting for a single product, said Professor Pierce.

“What we are seeing is that the proportion of daily users of electronic cigarettes has not increased with age – while with cigarettes the number of users increases rapidly with age,” he added.

“This rapid increase with age has only occurred with cigarettes, not with any other tobacco products.”

“Experimenting with electronic cigarettes and various other tobacco products before the age of 18 is also strongly associated with becoming daily smoking,” said newspaper author and oncologist Karen Messer, also from the University of California at San Diego.

‘We know that the use of electronic cigarettes among [US] high school seniors, the majority under 18, increased from 38 percent in 2016 to 45 percent in 2019. ‘

‘These results suggest that the recent rapid growth in the use of electronic cigarettes by teenagers will lead to an increase in daily cigarette consumption among young adults in the United States, reversing decades of declining cigarette consumption.

The full results of the study were published in the journal Pediatrics.