Unbalanced Authorship Cannot Produce Balanced Consideration of E-Cigarettes

• Published in: American journal of public health (1971) Vol. 112; no. 1; pp. e1 - e2
• Main Author: Maziak, Wasim
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Public Health Association 01.01.2022
• Subjects: Adolescents; Authorship; Backmatter; Cigarette smoking; Cigarettes; Electronic cigarettes; Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems; Experimentation; Experiments; Humans; Letter to the Editor; Letters & Responses; Other Tobacco; Public health; Smoking; Substance use; Teenagers; Tobacco; Vaping; Florida; United States > US
• ISSN: 0090-0036; 1541-0048
• DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2021.306554

I read with interest the analysis piece by Balfour et al., recently published in AJPH} In this piece, the authors correctly nvited a balanced consideration of e-cigarettes among their opponents and proponents. Yet in the introduction, they declared that "[m]any, including this article's authors, believe that vaping can benefit public health, given substantial evidence supporting the potential of vaping to reduce smoking'stoll."1(p1662; This statement basically places all of the authors in the "proponent group."Although evidence is always the guide, balanced authorship can ensure a fair selection and interpretation of evidence, which I believe eluded this piece. An example of this unbalanced analysis of the evidence can be found in the authors' discussion of the "gateway" potential of e-cigarettes, that is, e-cigarette use among adolescents leading to later cigarette smoking. Here the authors presented and discussed several studies for and against the gateway effect among youths. Yet, only studies suggesting a gateway effect were subjected to scrutiny by the authors in terms of their limitations, despite the fact that they were for the most part based on stronger longitudinal designs than the studies presented to refute the gateway effect.1 They also ignored stud-es that addressed their critiques of the gateway effect-by having a longitudina design, adjusting for other tobacco and substance use, and examining regular cigarette smoking rather than experimentation-and still revealed the same association (see, e.g., Osibogun et al.2).