April 2021 Cochrane living review of electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation update and questions

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Nicola Lindson discuss the April 2021 update to the Cochrane living review of electronic cigarettes for smoking cessation. This podcast is a companion to this Cochrane Review and shares the evidence from monthly searches and review findings.
In this episode Jamie Hartmann-Boyce and Nicola Lindson discuss the latest update to the review and respond to questions covering subjects, such as risk of bias, design of randomised control trials (RCTs), second hand vapour and sustainable cessation, put to them by listeners. This update includes six new studies that have been added since the 2020 version of the review and we are pleased to see the first inclusion of an RCT studying e-cigarette pod devices. There is still moderate certainty that nicotine containing e-cigarettes help more people to quit at 6 months or longer compared to e-cigarettes without nicotine or than NRT (nicotine replacement therapy). Uncertainty still exists around nicotine containing e-cigarettes compared to no intervention (eg continued smoking). This reflects that the quality of the evidence is considered very low according to Cochrane standards. In this update the low certainty evidence for no difference in adverse and serious adverse effects between nicotine e-cigarettes and non-nicotine e-cigarettes has been upgraded to moderate certainty evidence.

Jamie and Nicola also bring us up to date with the literature search conducted on April 1st, which found one linked and two new ongoing studies. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18020430 ; ANZCTR - Registration ; https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjci/ehaa946.2359