(CBC News) — Middle and high school students in Canada who tried an e-cigarette are twice as likely to be susceptible to smoking cigarettes, which researchers call concerning.
In a study published in the journal Preventive Medicine, public health investigators analyzed data from the most recent Canadian Student Tobacco, Alcohol and Drugs Survey of students in grades seven to 12.
About 10 per cent of the sample of more than 25,000 students said they’d ever tried an e-cigarette.
These children and adolescents were more than twice as likely to report being susceptible to smoking cigarettes, after controlling for other potential factors such as living in areas of Canada with higher smoking rates, behavioural issues and feelings of social connectedness to parents and teachers.
“Intentions are a strong predictor of eventual tobacco use,” study author Bruce Baskerville, a senior scientist at the University of Waterloo’s Propel Centre for Population Health Impact, said Monday.
“What we’re seeing in our sample is that there were a considerable number of kids who were intending on trying cigarettes. That’s concerning to us because we’ve made great headway over the last decade in reducing the amount of tobacco use, particularly amongst young people, and we see the potential of e-cigarettes now as being a possible threat to that success.” (…)