Health

Youth tobacco use rates declined slightly in US, but ‘work is far from over,’ health officials say

Overall tobacco use among youths dropped slightly, by about 1%, since last year,

Ibrahim

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6 Nov 2023

Nearly all students who use e-cigarettes reported using flavored products, according to a new survey.

largely driven by declines in e-cigarette use among high schoolers, according to data released Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration from the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey.

The new report finds that about 10% of students in those grades — or 2.8 million youth — reported using any type of tobacco product during 2022-2023.

But among middle school students, overall tobacco use increased from 4.5% to 6.6%, and and use of multiple tobacco products, such as cigarettes, cigars, e-cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, increased from 1.5% to 2.5%. E-cigarette use among middle school students stayed about the same as last year, the report says.

“E-cigarettes remained the most commonly used tobacco product among both high school and middle school students for the 10th year in a row,” the FDA said in a news release.

Approximately 2.1 out of 2.8 million students who reported using tobacco the past year were e-cigarette users, Dr. Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told CNN on Thursday.

About 1 in 4 students who use e-cigarettes use them daily and nearly all (89.4%) use flavored products, according to the FDA.

“The decline in e-cigarette use among high school students shows great progress, but our work is far from over,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, the director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. “Findings from this report underscore the threat that commercial tobacco product use poses to the health of our nation’s youth. It is imperative that we prevent youth from starting to use tobacco and help those who use tobacco to quit.

Middle school and high school students chose to use disposable e-cigarette products the most, the survey found, and for the first time ever, the survey asked about concept flavors like “iced” or “island bash.”