This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

For decades, boys and men were more likely than their female peers to use nicotine. But a new study from MUSC shows that among U.S. adolescents, that pattern has reversed for vaping.

Girls have been vaping at higher rates than boys since 2021, with the gap becoming particularly pronounced among older teenagers, according to the study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

The findings offer the first look at how smoking and vaping patterns have changed by age and gender across a full decade—from the rapid rise of e-cigarettes in the late 2010s through the shifting patterns of youth nicotine use seen today.

Benjamin Toll, Ph.D., director of the MUSC Health Tobacco Treatment Program and co-director of the Lung Cancer Screening Program at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center, said the latest numbers should serve as a warning that the youth vaping problem has not gone away.

"We have to understand why, and we need to mobilize our public health efforts," Toll said. "We need both prevention and intervention for these young people who are vaping at alarmingly high rates."

Previous research has captured pieces of the changing youth vaping landscape, but the new study is the first to examine smoking and vaping trends by age and gender across a full decade, from 2014 through 2024. That wider view allowed researchers to follow the evolution of youth vaping—from historically higher rates among boys, through the dramatic surge in use in 2018 and 2019 to the more recent emergence of higher rates among girls.

Source link