Adolescent health briefUse of Conventional and Alternative Tobacco and Nicotine Products Among a Sample of Canadian Youth
Section snippets
Methods
COMPASS is a cohort study designed to collect longitudinal data from a sample of grade 9–12 secondary school students in Ontario and Alberta, Canada. The present article reports findings from Year 2 (2013–2014; the first time e-cigarette use was assessed), conducted in 89 secondary schools (79 in Ontario; 10 in Alberta). A full description of the design and methods of the COMPASS study is published elsewhere [6] and available online at www.compass.uwaterloo.ca. After removing respondents with
Results
Overall, 7.2% of the sample (n = 3,166) reported having used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days. Table 1 shows the characteristics of the sample, as well as the percentage within each demographic group that had used an e-cigarette in the past 30 days. Results of the generalized linear mixed model, which indicated that all covariates were significantly associated with e-cigarette use, are also shown in Table 1.
Table 2 presents the percentage of past 30-day use of tobacco and alternative
Discussion
This study provides novel evidence regarding use of e-cigarettes among a large sample of Canadian youth. Approximately 7% of youth reported currently using e-cigarettes, higher than the recent U.S. estimate of 4.5% among high school students [7]. Although the current findings are not necessarily reflective of all Canadian youth, this difference is noteworthy given the greater degree of regulation on advertising, marketing, import, and sale of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes in Canada [5].
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Conflicts of Interest: The authors have no competing interests to declare. The COMPASS study was supported by a bridge grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes through the “Obesity—Interventions to Prevent or Treat” priority funding awards (OOP-110788; grant awarded to S.T.L.) and an operating grant from the CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health (MOP-114875; grant awarded to S.T.L.). Additional support was provided by CIHR Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (C.D.C.), a CIHR New Investigator Award (D.H.), CIHR Public Health Agency of Canada Chairs in Applied Public Health (D.H., S.T.L.), and the CIHR Training Grant in Population Intervention for Chronic Disease Prevention: A Pan-Canadian Program (Grant 53893; A.G.C.).