Electronic cigarette use among patients with cancer: Characteristics of electronic cigarette users and their smoking cessation outcomes
This study recruited over 1,000 cancer patients who were also smokers. They were all asked if they’d used e-cigs, and were grouped accordingly. The researchers followed up with them all six months later to see who’d quit.
What It Found
The e-cigarette users were just as likely as non-users to be abstinent from smoking after six months. They were even less likely depending on how the data was analysed.
The study led to headlines such as “E-cigarettes don’t help cancer patients quit smoking.”
What’s Wrong With It?
Like the quitline callers study, this study classed anybody who’d vaped in the month before the start of the study as an “e-cigarette user.” However, only those who continued to smoke were eligible to participate.
Michael Siegel poses the following situation to show the problem. 1000 vapers enter the cancer centre, but 900 have already quit smoking successfully. The 100 who didn’t quit would be the ones in this study.
If you focus on the treatment failures and ignore the successes, you can make any treatment look bad. Look specifically at 1000 people with headaches that don’t respond to paracetamol or cancer that doesn’t respond to chemo and you could make them look ineffective too.
Analysis of the Study
