New research based on U.S. government survey data shows, “The most popular methods used to stop smoking were nicotine products (53.9%; 1.5 million adults), especially e-cigarettes in combination with other methods (40.8%; 1.2 million) and e-cigarettes alone (26.0%; 0.7 million)” [confidence intervals removed by me]. Additionally, “Prescription drug products (8.1%; 0.2 million) and non-nicotine, non-prescription drug methods (6.3%; 0.2 million) were less popular.”
Tobacco researchers Floe Foxon (Pinney Associates) and Ray Niaura (New York University) made those observations in their new report, “Use of nicotine products, prescription drug products, and other methods to stop smoking by US adults in the 2022 National Health Interview Survey,” appearing in the journal Internal and Emergency Medicine (abstract here).
Foxon and Niaura analyzed “U.S. adults who self-reported having stopped smoking cigarettes for 6 months or longer in the last year and the methods they used, or who did not stop smoking but tried in the last year.” The survey that supplied the raw data is the standard instrument used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to count 29 million adult current and 56 million former U.S. smokers each year.
The researchers note that their results are similar to those in an earlier analysis of adult smokers in the FDA’s Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Survey. I conducted that study along with Nantaporn Plurphanswat and noted in a blog post, “e-cigarettes were one of the most commonly used quit aids by American smokers in 2013-2014, and that they were the only aid more likely to make one a former smoker (i.e., a successful quitter) than quitting cold-turkey.”
Now we have definitive population-level evidence, provided by the federal government, that e-cigarettes have been the most popular and among the most successful quit-smoking aids for almost a decade. It is long past time for government officials to acknowledge these facts.
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