Background
Patterning of cigarette and e-cigarette use among young people remains poorly
characterised. We aimed to describe these patterns in the UK Millennium Cohort Study at
age 14 and 17 years.
Methods
Data on cigarette and e-cigarette use come from 9,731 adolescents. Latent class analysis
assigned participants to membership of classes of product use and multinomial logistic
regression analyses assessed differences in the likelihood of belonging to classes by
sociodemographic (age, gender, ethnicity, household income, maternal education, country
of residence) and smoking-related social factors (caregiver tobacco use, caregiver ecigarette use, and peer smoking).
Results
We identified four classes of use: 45.8% of adolescents continued to abstain from cigarettes
or e-cigarettes; 21.3% experimented (used once or in the past but not currently) with
cigarettes and/or e-cigarettes by age 17 but were not current users; 19.0% were late
adopters, characterised by low levels of use at age 14 but high levels of experimentation and
current use at age 17; and 13.9% were early adopters, characterised by high levels of
experimentation and current use at ages 14 and 17. At age 17, 70.4% of early adopters
smoked cigarettes regularly plus an additional 27.3% experimented with cigarettes.
Corresponding percentages for e-cigarettes were 37.9% and 58.9%. Tobacco and ecigarette use by caregivers, and cigarette use by peers, were associated with being both late
adopters and early adopters.
Conclusion
Approximately one in seven adolescents in the UK are early adopters of nicotine products.
This highlights the need to develop and implement effective policies to prevent nicotine use
uptake.