While research has shown that more children are nearly twice as likely to try e-cigarettes above smoking, there is concern that ‘youth e-cigarette use may become a public health issue if left unmonitored’ and limiting the sale of e-cigarettes has been suggested while others say further research is needed to examine long-term youth e-cigarette and tobacco use.
Cardiff University questioned 32,479 children aged between 11 and 16 about their preferences, according to a paper published in the British Medical Journal, and found that 18.5% said they might try e-cigarettes but only 10.5% said they might ever smoke tobacco.
Smokers, ex-smokers and non-smokers were all questioned as part of the study, undertaken in 2015. And, of those questioned, 2.7% used e-cigarettes at least weekly and 41.8% of those who smoked daily also used them on a regular basis.
Elen de Lacy, lead author of the study, said: “Our data suggest that e-cigarette use is rapidly increasing among youths. Regular use by non-smokers remains very low, but is growing. The real need now is for further research to examine long-term youth e-cigarette and tobacco use and to understand e-cigarette use from young people’s perspectives.”
According to the BBC, the findings showed that while the number of those trying e-cigarettes had grown rapidly since 2013, most young people who had used both e-cigarettes and tobacco tried the latter first.
Dr Julie Bishop, from Public Health Wales, said young people using e-cigarettes on a regular basis ‘is something we should be concerned about, while a Welsh Government spokesman told the BBC it was ‘disappointing to see that experimentation with e-cigarettes is increasing amongst young people’.
He added: “Nicotine can cause addiction and harm the developing adolescent brain, which is why we are working to prevent the use of e-cigarettes by children and young people.”
Beating addictions and bad habits is, however, one of clinical hypnotherapy’s success stories and the National Council for Hypnotherapy, with more than 1,800 highly-trained therapists across the UK, has played a major role in helping people of all ages quit their addiction to nicotine and smoking.
Addiction to nicotine has long been documented and the NCH says addictions, or unwanted habits, are problem behaviours which can be controlled or eliminated through hypnotherapy.
This, says the NCH, is ‘something you feel you have no control over which affects your life and the lives of those you care about’.
The national body adds: “Habits such as overeating or smoking are the most common, among many others that affect people’s lives, make them unhappy or cause a risk to their health and the health of those around them.”
Clinical hypnotherapy and hypnosis, the NCH says, works rapidly and effectively with bad habits like smoking because it works directly with the subconscious, bypassing the critical mind and getting to the root of the issue so that changes can be made.
The NCH points out that, quite often, habits like smoking stem from peer group pressure and ‘the need to fit in’ but adds that a physical addiction to cigarettes can be broken through hypnotherapy after just one week while research shows that by quitting smoking with hypnosis, a person is three times more likely to give up permanently than if nicotine patches were used.
“Imagine how your different your life would be if you stopped smoking, what you would gain? It is important to understand your motivation for giving up in order to give up,” says the NCH.
While further research is being done in e-cigarettes and their potential addictive qualities, they do contain nicotine and this has been proven to be addictive. But, in the words of one e-cigarette company boss, the ‘vaping industry is here to stay’. But he added that responsibility was important and ‘we don’t want to be selling to youths. We don’t think it is right’.