PATH Study: Large Share of Tobacco Users Get Nicotine from Multiple Products

Preliminary results are in from the first large U.S. study to survey users about a wide variety of tobacco products, and they show that significant numbers of adults and youths are using multiple forms of tobacco, such as cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, cigars and smokeless tobacco.

These first-wave findings of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study, reported Feb. 26 at the 2015 Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT) annual meeting in Philadelphia, indicate that 43% of youth tobacco users ages 12-17 and just under 40% of adult tobacco users reported using two or more different tobacco products in the last 30 days. The researchers interviewed participants about use of 12 different tobacco products. Among “polyusers” who use more than one of these products, about 50% said they’d recently used e-cigarettes.

Andrew Hyland, PhD, Chair of the Department of Health Behavior at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, is principal investigator of the study. The PATH Study is a collaborative effort of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products and will include the largest cohort of tobacco users ever assembled. The team’s findings will help to explain how tobacco use affects health, and will guide federal regulatory actions related to tobacco products.

Westat Inc., of Rockville, Md., is leading the administration of the study, with Roswell Park designated as scientific lead. Other scientific partners are Legacy, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Waterloo, Dartmouth University and the Medical University of South Carolina.