Even among those who are highly committed to quitting smoking, their efforts can often be derailed by the smoker’s chemical dependence on nicotine. In the past, nicotine patches have been used to gradually reduce a person’s dependence upon nicotine to fully quit, but in the last decade, e-cigarettes, or electronic cigarettes, have been introduced to create the same effect.
According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, these battery-operated devices can actually improve a smoker’s chances of quitting.
The researchers, headed by Assoc. Prof. Christopher Bullen, followed 657 subjects’ attempts to quit for 13 weeks while using different quitting products: e-cigarettes with nicotine, e-cigarettes without nicotine and nicotine patches. The researchers found that participants in the e-cigarette with nicotine group had a much higher quitting percentage — 7.3 percent — than those in the other groups.
Although the results were not statistically significant, the researchers concluded that e-cigarettes could be just as effective for quitting as conventional nicotine patch techniques.
Bullen’s group also determined that e-cigarettes provide similar side effects to nicotine patches. They concluded that because of their accessibility, e-cigarettes could be used to improve overall population health not only by helping people quit smoking, but also by providing a healthier alternative to chemical-laden conventional cigarettes.
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