E-Cigarettes May Lure Teens into Traditional Smoking
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An article by Yahoo! Health, explores recent studies on teens and electronic cigarettes. The researchers behind the University of Hawaii Cancer Center in Honolulu study hope to use these results to help indicate what aspects of advertising and the availability of e-cigarettes is drawing in minors to the products who wouldn’t have otherwise used traditional cigarettes. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Youth Tobacco Survey has found that 10 percent of high-school students tried e-cigarettes in 2012, up from 4.7 percent in 2011. However, the study conducted by the University of Hawaii found that 29 percent of surveyed 1,941 ninth- and 10th-graders from three public and two private high schools on the island of Oahu tried electronic smoking devices. This study also raises concerns as nicotine can cause both short- and long-term changes in the adolescent brain. According to a 2012 review in the journal Cold Springs Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, teen exposure to nicotine can interfere with the development of the prefrontal cortex.