NEWS
YEAR LONG CLINICAL TRIAL TO ASSESS
LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF SWITCHING FROM
SMOKING TO ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTS
“One of the largest, most expensive, most ambitious projects we have ever undertaken.” - BAT.
By Dr Marina Murphy
It’s pretty much been established that products like e-cigarettes
and tobacco heating products emit a very different aerosol than
conventional cigarettes – they don’t create cigarette smoke. The
vapours they emit are chemically very different from smoke and
they have been shown to contain smaller numbers and reduced
levels of toxicants. But we have been here before! During the
decades-long search for a safer cigarette, scientists created
technologies that successfully stripped cigarette smoke of some
of the more notorious toxicants. The levels of some toxicant could
be reduced by more than 90%. However, studies in humans
revealed that even with such significant reductions in the targeted
toxicants, there didn’t seem to be compelling proof of beneficial
reduction in relative health risks and the commercial feasibility
and reduced risk potential of the prototype cigarettes were never
established.
So what about e-cigarettes and other novel nicotine products?
How do you demonstrate that there is a beneficial reduction of
relative health risks if a smoker switches from cigarettes to an
alternative product? The answer is: you need to study people
using these products and you need to study them for a long
time. That is why we at British American Tobacco are about to
launch what we think is a very exciting science project: one of the
largest, most expensive, most ambitious projects we have ever
undertaken – a large-scale clinical trial - that is a study involving
people. It will involve hundreds of consumers and will likely take
a few years to gather and analyse the results - results that we
think will help assess the long-term health effects of switching
from smoking to alternative products, like e-cigarettes.
Cigarette Smoke: The lumpy Mattress!
The situation with cigarette smoke is very complicated, because
cigarette smoke is very complicated. There are thousands of
chemicals swirling around reacting and interacting with each
other. The question then is what happens when you interfere with
this dynamic? It is possible that by changing the levels of
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