E-cigarettes: Can They Help People Quit?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do e-cigarettes make quitting smoking more difficult? Research last month claimed to show that e-cigarettes harm your chances of quitting smoking. The paper got coverage world-wide but it also came in for unusually fierce criticism from academics who spend their lives trying to help people quit. It's been described as 'grossly misleading' and 'not scientific'. We look at what is wrong with the paper and ask if it should have been published in the first place.
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Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Charlotte McDonald
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and thanks for downloading this edition of More or Less. |
| 0:03.2 | I'm Tim Harford and this program was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Friday the 5th of February. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to More or Less, your weekly guide to the numbers that surround us in the news and in life. |
| 0:16.4 | This week is it true that taking children out of school for a few days to get a cheaper holiday |
| 0:22.3 | will torpedo their GCSC chances. |
| 0:25.8 | What's it like to fact check the American election campaign? |
| 0:30.0 | And we ponder this statement from one of the UK's foremost statisticians. |
| 0:34.3 | I go bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl like that. |
| 0:36.3 | But first, you may have seen headlines like this in recent weeks. |
| 0:39.9 | Vaping, how e-cigarettes could be holding you back from quitting smoking. |
| 0:44.7 | E-cigarettes won't help you quit. Smokers using vapors are 28% less likely to ditch traditional cigarettes. Not good news if you were hoping to use e-cigarettes to help you give up smoking, |
| 0:57.0 | but this comes just a week or so after one brand of e-cigarettes |
| 1:01.0 | was approved as an aid to stop people smoking by the UK |
| 1:05.9 | Medicine regulator. That's the first step to becoming available on |
| 1:09.4 | prescription. So what's going on? Well more or less is Wesley Stevenson has been looking into this hello |
| 1:14.3 | Where's? Hello? Now this study what do we know about it? Well it was published in one of the Lancet spin-off journals the Lancet respiratory medicine |
| 1:22.2 | That's a well-respected journal, yeah? |
| 1:23.7 | It is, yes that's right, and it's a meta-analysis. That means that the authors reviewed all of the recent |
| 1:29.2 | academic literature to see what effect e-cigarettets had on people quitting smoking. |
| 1:34.0 | So they sifted out all the sketchier papers, the ones that didn't have control groups, for example, |
| 1:39.0 | and then they put the rest together to draw their conclusions. |
| 1:42.0 | The lead author was Professor Stanton Glance |
... |
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