How Healthy Are E-Cigarettes to Quit Smoking?

Smoking is the reason why there have been over 480,000 deaths every year in this country. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in five deaths can be attributed to smoking. There are still over 16 million Americans that are living with a smoking-induced condition. Clearly a lot needs to be done to make the Americans quit smoking.

Electronic cigarettes have been gaining a lot of popularity to help smokers stay off tobacco by causing little damage to their health. However, both these claims are false.

Jed E. Rose, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Duke Center for Smoking Cessation at Duke University, says that e-cigarettes are a great tool to quit smoking. However, on the other end of this argument is Pamela Ling, professor of medicine with Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at University of California, San Francisco.

Experts and U.S. Surgeon General have associated several smoke related diseases to combustion product and not the nicotine present in electronic cigarettes or tobacco. Even though nicotine is highly addictive, it is not the cause of cancer, vascular disease or lung disease seen in smokers. While it is recommended to quit all nicotine based products, smokers who try to quit smoking on their own succeed less than 5% times and have only 10% success rate with an assistance of a medical provider. In this situation, e-cigarettes may come in handy when it comes to kicking to butt.

Researchers from reputed organization such as U.K. Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies and the University of Geneva's Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, say that e-cigarettes can help in reducing or eliminating the use of tobacco, with British government approving its use to quit smoking. According to the available evidence, e-cigarettes have been proven safe and far less risky than cigarettes.

Even though e-cigarettes have garnered immense support, there are some researchers who have focused their attention on health concerns caused due to presence of formaldehyde, a toxic substance present in cigarette smoke.