More teens are vaping and smoking.
Health officials are worried that vaping represents a growing problem throughout the United States. At first, many people thought that vaping would be a substitute for smoking, but it seems that Americans are still smoking and vaping as well. This ‘trend’ is widely spread, especially among teenagers, based on the recent statistics.
Smoking represents a risk factor when it comes to the development of health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, heart attack, strokes, brain disease, and cancer. Worse, smoking is the largest preventable cause of disease and death in the United States because it kills over 480,000 Americans every year, according to the officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Recent research has shown that teenagers who would have never smoked cigarettes are now addicted to the use of electronic cigarettes.
These devices were first introduced to the United States market in 2007. But in 2011, after the first study conducted by the National Youth Tobacco Survey, scientists discovered that 1.5 percent of teenagers had used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days before the research.
Four years later, the number of teenagers vaping increased to 16 percent. According to Jessica Barrington Trimis, lead author of a 2014 study and a research associate in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, around 14 percent of the 12th grade-high school seniors admitted that they had vaped or smoked in the previous 30 days before the study.
Barrington-Trimis underlined that if e-cigarettes were meant to be a replacement for traditional cigarettes, then there should have been a decline in smoking rates by 2014. Instead, cigarette use has dropped off between 1995 and 2004, but smoking rates have increased.
In other words, people started combining smoking with vaping which led to a critical situation throughout the country. Based on the data gathered by experts, some teenagers who are currently vaping would have never smoked if e-cigarettes had been introduced on the market.
These surveys were based on five groups of high school teens monitored in 2014, 2004, 2001, 1998, and 1995. According to Rob McConnell, senior author of the study and USC Keck Medicine professor of preventive medicine, this prolonged exposure to the flavorings and vaporized liquids in e-cigarettes increases the risk of health conditions, especially related to the brain of the teenagers.
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