Vaping: One million adults in England who never regularly smoked now use e-cigarettes

The number of adults in England who use e-cigarettes despite never regularly smoking tobacco has risen sharply to around a million people, a study has found.1

Researchers at University College London (UCL) estimated the vaping prevalence in England by analysing survey data covering July 2016 to April 2024 from 153 073 adults, of whom 94 107 had never regularly smoked tobacco.

Their modelling showed that the proportion of England’s adults who were never regular smokers but who then vaped was small before 2021, averaging 0.5% (95% confidence interval 0.5% to 0.6%) from July 2016 to December 2020. But by April 2024 this had risen to 3.5% (2.8% to 2.4%).

Published in Lancet Public Health,1 their analysis estimates that …