LONDON — Electronic cigarettes worked as well as nicotine patches to help smokers quit, according to the first study to compare them.
E-cigarettes are battery-operated products that look like real cigarettes and turn nicotine into a vapor inhaled by the user. Since the devices hit the market nearly a decade ago, sales have spiked so quickly some analysts predict they will outsell traditional cigarettes within a decade.
E-cigarettes are often marketed as a less harmful alternative to smokes and come in flavors.
“This research provides an important benchmark for e-cigarettes,” said Chris Bullen, director of the National Institute for Health Innovation at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the study’s lead author. Until now, there has been little information about the effectiveness or safety of e-cigarettes.
Bullen and colleagues recruited 657 adult smokers in Auckland who wanted to quit for the study. Nearly 300 got nicotine-containing e-cigarettes while roughly the same number got nicotine patches. Just over 70 people got placebo e-cigarettes without any nicotine. Each group used the e-cigarettes or patches for 13 weeks.
After six months, similar rates of smokers — 6 percent to 7 percent — managed to quit after using either the nicotine-containing e-cigarettes or patches. Only 4 percent of smokers using the placebo e-cigarettes successfully quit.
The study was published online Sunday in the journal Lancet and presented at a meeting of the European Respiratory Society in Barcelona, Spain.
