Vaping is better than patches or gums for quitting smoking – updated review

Johner Images/Getty Images If you’ve ever been a smoker, you’ll know how hard it is to quit.

It can take as many as 30 attempts to finally break the habit.

An updated Cochrane review assessed the evidence of which common tools are most effective to help people quit smoking for six months.

It found e-cigarettes (or vapes) containing nicotine are more effective than other types of nicotine-replacement therapies (including patches and gums) and counselling support.

Here’s what this means for people trying to quit smoking.

What the reserchers examined Cochrane reviews draw together the most robust evidence to answer a research question, in this case, the most effective way to give up smoking.

The reviewers compared the efficacy and safety of different categories of aids to quit smoking: vapes containing nicotine, which use a battery to create an aerosol that can be inhaled nicotine-replacement therapies such as nicotine gum, patches and inhalers non-nicotine vapes counselling support for quitting, or no support at all.

The review was based on 80 randomised control trials which included 29,861 participants.

These randomly allocate participants either to receive a treatment or to a control group, which receives a different intervention, standard care or no treatment.

Twelve of these studies were rated as being at low risk of bias; 41 were rated at high risk of bias; and the remainder had an unclear risk.

The reviewers assessed whether the findings changed when they excluded tobacco industry-funded studies and those judged to be at high risk of bias.

There were no differences in their substantive conclusions.

What they found The reviewers found high-certainty evidence that using vapes containing nicotine produced higher quit rates than nicotine-replacement therapy, such as patches and gums.

For every 100 people using nicotine vapes to stop smoking, eight to ten might successfully stop, compared with only six of 100 people using nicotine-replacement therapy.