Let's talk e-cigarettes, April 2025

What this episode covers

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Nicola Lindson explore new e-cigarette research and speak with Eden Evins from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, about her randomized clinical trial on varenicline for youth vaping cessation. Associate Professor Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Associate Professor Nicola Lindson discuss the new evidence in e-cigarette research and interview Professor Eden Evins from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. In the April podcast Eden Evins discusses the findings of their new randomised clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of varenicline for nicotine vaping cessation in 261 treatment seeking youth (16-24 years) who do not smoke tobacco regularly. This study has just been published in JAMA, April 2025 (DOI:10.1001/jama.2025.3810 NCT05367492). Professor Evins describes her interest in the high use of vapes among young people and the speed at which this increase to a different flavoured form of nicotine has occurred. Professor Evins and her team thought that varenicline, a pill based drug that is used for quitting smoking, could work for vaping cessation. She talks about the huge demand to take part in the study and how the team had to pause recruitment to keep up. She describes how young people were indignant, they had not expected to become addicted. Professor Evins says that when young people found they couldn't sit through a study session without needing to vape they were surprised and felt taken advantage of by marketers and these flavored products that they had thought were for fun. Their study funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US shows that the continuous abstinence rates in the last month of treatment (51% vs 14%) and at 6-month follow-up (28% vs 7%) are higher in the varenicline group than in the placebo group. This was a 12-week trial with 6 month follow up. Treatment-emergent adverse events did not differ significantly between groups. In summary varenicline, when added to brief cessation counselling, is well tolerated and promotes nicotine vaping cessation compared with placebo in youth with addiction to vaped nicotine. This podcast is a companion to the electronic cigarettes Cochrane living systematic review and Interventions for quitting vaping review and shares the evidence from the monthly searches. Our search for the EC for smoking cessation review carried out on 1st April 2025 found 1 new ongoing study (NCT06789692) and 5 linked papers. Our search for our interventions for quitting vaping review up to 1st April 2025 found 3 new ongoing studies (NCT06862050; TCTR20250203006; NCT06885606), For further details see our webpage under 'Monthly search findings': https://www.cebm.ox.ac.uk/research/electronic-cigarettes-for-smoking-cessation-cochrane-living-systematic-review-1 For more information on the full Cochrane review of E-cigarettes for smoking cessation updated in January 2025 see: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD010216.pub9/full For more information on the full Cochrane review of Interventions for quitting vaping published in January 2025 see: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD016058.pub2/full This podcast is supported by Cancer Research UK.

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