E-cigarettes Reverse Decades of Decline in Percentage of US Youth Struggling to Quit Nicotine

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by University of Michigan News.

The number of adolescents who have attempted to quit e-cigarettes and failed has grown with the rapid increase in teen e-cigarette use in the past five years, according to a study by University of Michigan researchers.

The findings suggest, however, that e-cigarette use has reversed a two-decade-long decline among youth who made attempts to quit nicotine and failed.

In 2020, 6% of teens reported a failed quit attempt for either cigarettes or e-cigarettes. This compares with a failed quit attempt level for cigarettes of 4% in 2009, when cigarettes were the primary nicotine product for adolescents and e-cigarette prevalence was still near zero.

The 2020 level of 6% (for both cigarettes and e-cigarettes combined) compares with the percentage of youth with failed attempts to quit regular cigarettes that was at 10% in 1997 and that gradually declined over the next two decades to 2% by 2020.

“These results indicate that failed nicotine quit attempt levels have gone back to where they were about 17 years ago for adolescents,” said Richard Miech, research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The analysis used data from U-M’s Monitoring the Future, a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The project annually conducts nationally representative surveys of U.S. eighth, 10th and 12th grade students. For this study, the analysis pool was 815,690 students who participated in the project between 1997 and 2020.

Source: University of Michigan
https://news.umich.edu/e-cigarettes-reverse-decades-of-decline-in-percentage-of-us-youth-struggling-to-quit-nicotine/