E-Cigarette Use Leads to Traditional Cigarette Use in Adolescents

E-cigarettes have been heavily marketed to youth in the U.S., and there is concern that e-cigarette use is associated with future use of traditional cigarettes.

To examine this association, researchers repeatedly surveyed public high school students in Connecticut over a 3-year period (2013–2015) about their past-month use of e-cigarettes and conventional cigarettes. Using survey data from roughly 800 students (88% white), the investigators designed a model to analyze bidirectional relationships between e-cigarette and traditional cigarette use. They found that e-cigarette use in each of the survey years predicted traditional cigarette use in subsequent surveys. For example, compared with students who did not use e-cigarettes, students who r…