WSMoreOrLess: Do e-cigarettes really harm your chances of quitting smoking?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2016
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
(Image: Man smoking e-cigarette. Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and thanks for downloading the shorter World Service edition of More or Less. |
| 0:04.4 | I'm Tim Harford and this week we'll be discussing whether e-cigarettes help you quit smoking. |
| 0:10.0 | If you're a loyal listener, you will have heard a version of this story before, but this edition here is a bit longer. |
| 0:16.0 | So if you're particularly keen, give it a try. |
| 0:19.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:22.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts. you for |
| 0:23.3 | downloading from the BBC. The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use |
| 0:25.8 | go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life and I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:41.0 | You may have heard headlines like this in recent weeks. |
| 0:45.0 | E-cigarettes won't help you quit. Smokers using vapors are 28% less likely to ditch traditional cigarettes. |
| 0:53.0 | Vaping, how e-cigarettes could be holding you back from quitting smoking. |
| 0:58.0 | Not good news if you were hoping to use e-cigarettes to help you give up smoking, but this comes just a week or so after one brand of |
| 1:06.0 | e-cigarettes was approved as an aid to stop people smoking by the UK Medicine |
| 1:11.8 | regulator. That's the first step to becoming available on |
| 1:14.8 | prescription. So what's going on? Well more or less his Wesley Stevenson has been |
| 1:18.8 | looking into this. Hello. Hello. Now this study what do we know about it? |
| 1:22.3 | Well it was published in one of the Lancet spin-off journals, the Lancet Respiratory Medicine. |
| 1:27.8 | That's a well-respected journal, yeah. |
| 1:29.2 | It is, yes, that's right, and it's a meta-analysis. |
| 1:31.4 | That means that the authors reviewed all of the recent |
| 1:34.7 | academic literature to see what effect e-cigarettes had on people quitting smoking |
... |
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