April 2, 2015

Study Says Teens Who Use Alcohol More Likely to Use E-Cigarettes

A new study found that teens who drink alcohol, especially those who engage in binge drinking, are more likely to use electronic cigarettes than those who don’t use alcohol. The British study was reported in HealthDay.

“We found that e-cigarette access is strongly related to alcohol use in teenagers,” study author Karen Hughes said in a news release. Hughes, a professor of behavioral epidemiology at Liverpool John Moores University in England, continued, “Those who drink are more likely to have accessed e-cigarettes than non-drinkers, regardless of whether they smoke normal cigarettes or not, and those who drink frequently, binge drink, drink to get drunk, drink strong alcohol products, and show signs of unsupervised alcohol consumption are most likely to have accessed e-cigarettes.”

The researchers surveyed more than 16,000 high school students and found that 20 percent of them had used e-cigarettes. Of those who had tried e-cigarettes, 16 percent had never smoked, 23 percent had tried smoking but didn’t care for it, nearly 36 percent were regular smokers, nearly 12 percent only smoked when drinking, and nearly 14 percent were ex-smokers.

According to the study, students who drank alcohol were much more likely to use e-cigarettes than non-drinkers, and those who regularly participated in binge drinking were four times more likely to use e-cigarettes than those who didn’t drink.

The study was published in the journal BMC Public Health.

SEE ALSO:

Why E-cigarettes Have Some People All Choked Up

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