University of Pennsylvania Professor of Psychiatry and LDI Senior Fellow Janet Audrain McGovern’s new study on the effect of e-cigarette flavorings on the level of use among young people is the subject of an article in the Philly Voice. The 18-month study tracked the vaping preferences and practices of 350 Philadelphia area high school students.

Audrain McGovern, PhD, who is a member of the Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center’s Tobacco and Environmental Carcinogenesis Program, is also a faculty member in Abramson’s new Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation (PC3I).

First experience
Published in the Drug and Alcohol Dependence journal earlier this month, the study — Initial e-cigarette flavoring and nicotine exposure and e-cigarette update among adolescents — concluded that when young peoples’ first experience with an e-cigarette is a flavored one, they are more like to more frequently use the nicotine delivery devices.

“We weren’t surprised by the finding,” Audrain-McGovern told the Philly Voice. “It’s what we, as researchers, would have expected given the number of adolescents that use e-cigarettes and the popularity of flavoring.”

The findings add scientific backing to the recent federal government move to ban flavoring in e-cigarette products.

Over the summer, the overall safety of using e-cigarettes has come into increasing question in the wake of deaths and serious illnesses associated with the vaping devices. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that six people in six states have so far died and 380 others across 36 states have been seriously sickened. Hundreds of other possible cases are being investigated.