by tyler | May 1, 2023 | CNN, health
When the US Covid-19 public health emergency ends this month, coronavirus tests will still be available, but there will be changes to who pays for them.
Questions remain about exactly what those coverage changes will look like, but the guarantee of free testing will be lost for many – and some costs may shift to become out-of-pocket.
There are still ways to take advantage of the benefits provided by the public health emergency before it expires May 11.
For the past two years, the federal government has required private insurance companies to cover up to eight Covid-19 tests each month. Packs of home tests can be found at pharmacies and other local retailers, and costs may be covered upfront or reimbursed by insurance plans.
The Biden administration launched COVIDtests.gov in January 2022 to allow US households to order free Covid-19 test kits to be delivered to home. The site is still up and running, with four free tests available to any household that hasn’t ordered since December.
Also, the US Food and Drug Administration has extended the expiration date for many home tests beyond what is printed on the box. Check the agency’s website before throwing them out.
“People should go out and ensure that they have tests available, because what we know about Covid is it’s quite pernicious, and clearly, people can get it more than once,” said Mara Aspinall, a professor at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions and a testing and diagnostics expert.
“It’s critical that people have the ability to test and then isolate or stay at home if they test positive.”
Once the public health emergency ends, Covid-19 tests – both home tests and laboratory tests – will be subject to cost sharing, in which costs of services are divided between the patient and their insurance plan.
Private insurers will no longer be required to cover the costs of testing. The federal government has encouraged continued coverage, but each company will ultimately be able to make their own decision. So far, details on those plans are scarce.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association told CNN that it’s evaluating the best way to keep members informed of changes. Moving into the next phase, coverage may include “reasonable limits” on tests.
“As COVID-19 becomes endemic, each Blue Cross and Blue Shield company is looking at how best to support access to diagnostic testing for COVID-19, just as is done for all other diagnostic testing,” said David Merritt, senior vice president of policy and advocacy for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. “We are committed to protecting patients from unnecessary costs, while ensuring they receive the care they need, when they need it.”
Aetna told CNN that it did not have any details to share. Cigna, Humana and UnitedHealthcare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Medicare Part B beneficiaries will continue to have coverage for lab tests when ordered by a provider, but the same will not apply for home tests.
For those on Medicaid plans, all tests will continue to be covered for free until the end of September 2024.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also continue to support uninsured individuals and socially vulnerable communities “pending resource availability,” according to a roadmap outlined by the US Department of Health and Human Services.
There may be other avenues to free or cheap testing, too – perhaps through state and local governments or other programs.
Recently, for example, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services announced the expansion of a program that now allows all state residents to order free tests through June.
The Rockefeller Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, has also extended a public-private partnership program that works with states to get free tests to at-risk communities.
“The testing phenomenon during Covid changed many times,” Aspinall said.
It was a core focus at the beginning, but the priority then shifted to vaccines, she said. The initial Omicron wave brought a renewed interest in testing, and long waits for lab-based tests drove people to home tests.
“It put power and privacy in an individual consumer’s hand,” Aspinall said.
Millions of households took advantage of free Covid-19 tests provided by the federal government in the months after it launched, and a recent CDC report shows that the program helped to get kits to many who otherwise wouldn’t have tested and improved equity in testing overall.
About 60% of US households ordered a test kit from COVIDTests.gov, and nearly a third of all US households reported using at least one of those tests by April or May last year.
Nearly a quarter of people who reported using the government-provided tests said that they probably would not have tested for Covid-19 if not for the free kits, according to the report – suggesting that more than 13 million people took a Covid-19 test who otherwise wouldn’t have. More than 1 in 5 people who used their free tests reported at least one positive result.
Overall, use of the free test kits was similar across racial and ethnic groups. This is a “considerable difference” from other home test kits, where use was “highly inequitable,” according to the report. Black people were more likely than White people to use tests provided through COVIDTests.gov but 72% less likely than White people to use other at-home test kits.
Now, however, Covid-19 cases are a third of what they were a year ago, and hospitalizations and deaths are about as low as they’ve ever been. Testing rates have dropped significantly, too.
Along with the decreased transmission, the volume of testing may have dropped as people better understand what the course of an infection looks like, Aspinall said.
She estimates that people may use an average of one or two tests per incident, down from an average of five or six.
While Covid-19 “remains a public health priority,” the federal government says “we are in a better place in our response than we were three years ago, and we can transition away from the emergency phase.”
Still, experts agree that continued monitoring is key. Advancements in technologies like wastewater surveillance have helped supplement dwindling testing data, but testing will continue to be an important tool for individuals to keep themselves and their loved ones safe and healthy.
“The public health emergency may be over but Covid is not over,” Aspinall said.
by tyler | Apr 28, 2023 | CNN, health
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still requiring international visitors boarding flights to the United States to be vaccinated against Covid-19, but it’s easing vaccine requirements for those travelers.
International travelers boarding flights to the United States will now be considered fully vaccinated two weeks after getting a single dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccine any time after August 16, 2022, when bivalent formulations first became available. The updated travel guidance was posted on the agency’s website on Thursday.
The change aligns with the CDC’s recently simplified vaccine guidance for Americans; those who are unvaccinated are now considered fully vaccinated after a single dose of a bivalent vaccine, which protects against more strains of the virus than the original shot.
Previously, foreign travelers entering the United States were considered fully vaccinated two weeks after the second dose of a vaccine that required two primary doses, or two weeks after a vaccine that only required a single shot, such as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
A number of older, monovalent vaccine regimens also qualify a foreign visitor as fully vaccinated. Those include:
The travel requirements don’t apply to US citizens, lawful permanent residents, or immigrants.
Earlier this month, the CDC signed off on a plan to streamline Covid-19 vaccination. As part of the update, the older monovalent mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are no longer recommended in the United States, and updated vaccines are recommended for everyone age 6 months and older.
by tyler | Apr 28, 2023 | CNN, health
With the weather warming up, you might feel inspired to clean out your closets, wash your windows and give your house a deep scrub and reorganization. Not only is a clean environment good for your physical health, but research has shown that the good feelings you get from having a clean, uncluttered home reduce stress levels and ward off depression.
Imagine how great you would feel if you took that same spring-cleaning approach to your body — your living, breathing home.
Of course, you should already be subscribing to annual checkups with your primary care physician and eye doctor, and you may even see your dentist biannually. But what about taking a closer look at how you fuel and move your body — and making healthy changes to clean up those areas?
As a mind-body coach in professional sports, I work with coaches, medical staff and expert consultants every year during baseball spring training to help players prepare their bodies for the season. In addition to conducting annual physicals, we do nutritional and movement assessments to create appropriate action plans.
You may not be a professional athlete, but your body is still the vehicle used to navigate your life, and the quality of its ability to move and how well you feel in it affects the overall quality of your life.
That’s why I enlisted the help of two nutrition and human movement experts to provide 10 “spring-cleaning” tips to avoid injury, move pain-free, reduce inflammation, maintain a healthy weight and generally feel better in your body.
Important note: It’s recommended to consult your doctor before starting any new exercise programs or dietary changes.
You might expect a cleanse to be tip No. 1, but think twice before you dive into one of the many popular advertised cleanses. A lot of them can “do more harm than good,” according to registered dietitian Angie Asche, owner of Eleat Sports Nutrition and author of “Fuel Your Body: How to Cook and Eat for Peak Performance.” Asche said cleanses can be dehydrating and contain herbal supplements with potentially negative side effects and contraindications with certain medications. What’s more, some of these regimens don’t deliver on their promise, according to the National Institutes of Health. “Most are missing key nutrients that are necessary for your body to naturally detoxify,” she explained.
Fiber, found in plant foods, is the key to safe and efficient cleansing, according to Asche. She advises eating five to nine fruits and vegetables daily for bowel regularity and weight management. “Not only do plant foods like nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains, fruit and vegetables contain antioxidants,” Asche said, “but the more variety of plants we have in our diets, the better for the diversity of our gut biome.”
With your focus on eating more real, whole foods rich in fiber, Asche also recommends limiting ultraprocessed packaged foods such as cookies, candy, crackers, baked goods and fried foods. These foods are full of saturated fat, sodium, sugar and preservatives while being devoid of nutritional value.
How much water you drink affects all the functions of your body — including your mental performance; a body water loss of just 1% to 2% can impair cognitive function. To promote good health and weight management, Asche advises drinking at least half your body weight in ounces daily but said the amount can vary depending on a person’s activity level.
Asche said that most fluids, including tea, coffee and carbonated water, can count toward your water intake, but she points out that alcohol does not — and should be limited. “In large amounts, alcohol can overwhelm the gut, promoting intestinal inflammation and increasing harmful bacteria … (which) can lead to a wide range of health problems,” she said.
Screens that look at your ability to do functional movements, such as squatting and lunging, are a great way to proactively prevent injury, according to physical therapist Gray Cook, a cofounder of Functional Movement Systems.
“Signs of weakness, tightness and balance problems can be early indicators of arthritis and posture issues as well as increased injury risk for athletes and fall risk for the elderly,” Cook said.
You can get the assistance of a physical therapist or qualified trainer to perform a movement assessment, but a recent study showed that self-movement assessment (using an app codeveloped by Cook) is valid and reliable for identifying musculoskeletal risk factors.
Whether working with professional athletes or doing my own workouts, I ensure that I cover all primary functional movements in all planes of motion in every training session. Executing that kind of total-body workout sounds more complicated than it is. It’s simply about practicing and strengthening your ability to perform your body’s basic movement functions: squatting, hinging, pushing, pulling, rotating and stabilizing your core.
And, just like the multidirectional movement of everyday life, it helps to exercise in all three planes of motion: sagittal (forward/backward), frontal (side to side) and transverse (rotating). You can easily practice these movements with a body-weight workout or yoga flow.
The key to exercise’s effectiveness is consistency. With as little as 11 minutes of exercise per day, you can enjoy numerous health benefits — including increasing your life span. Walking outside is a great way to get in those 11 minutes daily, and because of the alternating and reciprocal nature of gait, it offers the opportunity to tune into your body and self-assess by noticing if there are any imbalances.
Breathing plays a vital role in how you think, feel and move. In addition to reducing your heart rate, blood pressure and stress response, learning how to breathe better will improve your diaphragm function and rib mobility, which can improve posture and reduce back pain. Practice taking breathing breaks a few minutes throughout your day.
Sleep is essential for overall health. Adults need at least seven hours of sleep nightly, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If you’re not getting that minimum amount of shut-eye, it’s time to clean up your sleep routine and start prioritizing rest.
Just like the physical and mental benefits of traditional spring-cleaning within your home, these 10 tips will refresh and revitalize your body and mind in noticeably positive ways.
by tyler | Apr 28, 2023 | CNN, health
Disease detectives with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are investigating a cluster of rare and serious brain abscesses in kids in and around Las Vegas, Nevada, and doctors from other parts of the country say they may be seeing a rise in cases, too.
In 2022, the number of brain abscesses in kids tripled in Nevada, rising from an average of four to five a year to 18.
“In my 20 years’ experience, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Taryn Bragg, an associate professor at the University of Utah who treated the cases.
Pediatric neurosurgeons like Bragg are rare. She is the only one for the entire state of Nevada, and because she treated all the cases, she was the first to notice the pattern and to alert local public health officials.
“After March of 2022, there was just a huge increase,” in brain abscesses, Bragg said. “I was seeing large numbers of cases and that’s unusual.”
“And the similarities in terms of the presentation of cases was striking,” Bragg said.
In almost every case, kids would get a common childhood complaint, such as an earache or a sinus infection, with a headache and fever, but within about a week, Bragg says, it would become clear that something more serious was going on.
After a presentation on the Nevada cases the Epidemic Intelligence Service Conference on Thursday, doctors from other parts of the country said they are seeing similar increases in brain abscesses in kids.
“We’re just impressed by the number of these that we’re seeing right now,” said Dr. Sunil Sood, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Northwell Health, a health system in New York. He estimates they are seeing at least twice as many as usual, though they haven’t done a formal count. He urged the CDC to continue investigating and work to get the word out.
Brain abscesses are not, by themselves, reportable conditions, meaning doctors aren’t required to alert public health departments when they have these cases.
They typically only come to the attention of public health officials when doctors notice increases and reach out.
Brain abscesses are pus-filled pockets of infection that spread to the brain. They can cause seizures, visual disturbances, or changes in vision, speech, coordination or balance. The earliest symptoms are headaches and a fever that comes and goes. Abscesses often require several surgeries to treat, and kids may spend weeks or even months in the hospital recovering after they have one.
In the Clark County cluster, roughly three-quarters of the cases were in boys, and most were around age 12.
Dr. Jessica Penney is the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, or “disease detective,” assigned to Southern Nevada Health District, the health department that investigated the cases. She presented her investigation of the Clark County cluster at the CDC’s annual Epidemic Intelligence Service conference on Thursday.
Penney says as they tried to figure out what was driving the increase, they looked at a slew of factors – travel, a history of Covid-19 infection, underlying health, any common activities or exposures – and they didn’t find anything that linked the cases.
Then, she says they decided to look back in time, looking for brain abscess cases in children under 18 all the way back to 2015.
“I felt like that helped us get a better sense of what might be contributing to it,” Penney said in an interview with CNN.
From 2015 to 2020, Penney says the number of cases of brain abscesses in Clark County was pretty stable at around four a year. In 2020, the number of brain abscesses in kids dipped, probably because of measures like social distancing, school closures, and masking – things that shut down the spread of all kinds of respiratory infections, not just Covid-19. In 2021, as restrictions began to lift, the number of these events returned back to normal levels, and then in 2022, a big spike.
“So the thoughts are, you know, maybe in that period where kids didn’t have these exposures, you’re not building the immunity that you would typically get previously, you know with these viral infections,” Penney said. “And so maybe on the other end when we you had these exposures without that immunity from the years prior, we saw a higher number of infections.”
This is a theory called the immunity debt. Doctors have recently seen unusual increases in a number of serious childhood infections, such as invasive group A strep. Some think that during the years of the pandemic, because children weren’t exposed to the number of viruses and bacteria they might normally encounter, it left their immune systems less able to fight off infections.
Sood said he’s not sold on the theory that there’s some kind of immunity debt at work. Instead, he thinks Covid-19 temporarily displaced other infections for a while, essentially crowding others out. Now, as Covid-19 cases have fallen, he thinks other childhood infections are roaring back – he points to unprecedented surge in RSV cases last fall and winter as an example.
Sood says brain abscesses normally follow a very small percentage of sinus infections and inner ear infections in kids. Because they are seeing more of those infections now, the number of brain abscesses has increased proportionally, too.
If immunity debt or a higher burden of infections were to blame, it stands to reason that brain abscesses might have increased in other places, too.
Last year, the CDC worked with the Children’s Hospital Association to find and count brain abscesses in kids, to see if there was any sort of national spike. Data collected through May 2022 did not detect any kind of widespread increase, according to a study published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report last fall.
But Bragg thinks the data cutoff for the study may have been too early. She says spring 2022 was when she saw cases in her area really take off. She says the CDC is continuing to collect information on brain abscesses and evaluate local and national trends.
About a third of the brain abscesses in the Clark County cluster were caused by a type of bacteria called Streptococcus intermedius that normally hangs out harmlessly in the nose and mouth, where our immune system keeps it in check. But when it gets into places it shouldn’t be, like the blood or brain, it can cause problems.
That can happen after dental work, for example, or when someone has an underlying health condition that weakens their immunity, like diabetes.
That wasn’t the case with the kids in the Clark County cluster, however.
“These are healthy children. With no prior significant medical history that would make them more prone…there wasn’t any known immunosuppression or anything like that,” Bragg says.
Like the cases in Clark County, Sood says most of the kids they are seeing are older, in grade school and middle school. He says until kids reach this age, their sinus cavities are underdeveloped, and haven’t yet grown to their full size. This may make them particularly vulnerable to infection. He thinks these small spaces may become filled with pus and burst. When that happens over the eyebrow, or behind the ear, where the barrier between the brain and sinuses is thinner, the infection can travel to the brain.
Sood says the signs of a sinus infection in kids can be subtle and parents don’t always know what to watch for. If a child gets a cold or stuffy nose and then the next day wakes up with a red and swollen eye, or an eye that’s swollen shut, it’s a good idea to seek medical attention. They may also complain of a headache and point to the spot above their eyebrow as the location of the pain.
Bragg says so far, in 2023, she’s treated two more kids with brain abscesses, but the pace of new cases seems to be slowing down – at least she hopes that’s the case.
Some of the children she treated needed multiple brain and head and neck surgeries to clear their infections.
Sood says in his hospital, doctors have a patient who has been there for two to three months and had five surgeries, although he says she was an extreme case.
Penney says the CDC continues to watch the situation closely.
“We’re going to continue to monitor throughout the year working very closely with our community partners to see you know what, what happens down in Southern Nevada,” she said.
by tyler | Apr 27, 2023 | CNN, health
Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, but there are ways to significantly reduce your risk.
Along with regular exercise and not smoking, a healthy diet is a key way to keep heart disease at bay. But which diet best meets the dietary guidelines of the American Heart Association?
In a new scientific statement, leading experts in nutrition ranked 10 popular diets on their ability to meet the AHA’s evidence-based dietary guidance for heart health, published in 2021.
The winner? The DASH diet, which was 100% aligned with AHA goals for heart-healthy eating. DASH stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension; high blood pressure is a major contributor to heart disease and stroke.
The pescatarian diet, which allows dairy, eggs, fish and other seafood but no meat or poultry, was 92% aligned with the AHA guidelines. The lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet, which allows dairy and eggs, and variations that include one or the other, were 86% aligned.
The award-winning Mediterranean diet was 89% aligned with the AHA dietary recommendations. The popular diet came in third mostly because it recommends a small glass of red wine each day and doesn’t limit salt, said lead author Christopher Gardner, a research professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in California who directs its Nutrition Studies Research Group.
“The American Heart Association says no one should drink alcohol if they haven’t started,” Gardner said. “And if they do drink, to do so minimally.”
Research has linked the Mediterranean diet to reduced risk for diabetes, high cholesterol, dementia, memory loss, depression and breast cancer as well as weight loss, stronger bones, a healthier heart and longer life.
But all of these diets share so much in common they can really be grouped together as a top “tier” of eating patterns, Gardner said.
“We basically were trying to say a diet doesn’t have to be 100 to be good,” he said. “All of the diets in the top tier are plant-based, and if they are off base a bit aren’t hard to fix. Paleo and keto, however, really can’t be fixed. You’d have to completely overhaul them.”
Very low-carb diets, such as Atkins, and various keto diets, such as the well-formulated ketogenic diet, or WFKD, were in the bottom tier of heart-healthy eating patterns, due to their emphasis on red meat, whole dairy and saturated fats, as well as limited fruit and vegetable intake.
A vegan diet that incorporated more than 10% fat and low-fat diets such as volumetrics were in the second tier — both met 78% of the AHA dietary guidelines, according to the statement.
Very low-fat diets with less than 10% fat, which applies to some vegan lifestyles (72%), and low-carb diets such as South Beach, Zone and the low-glycemic index (64%) were less aligned and made up the third tier of diets.
While people concerned with heart health can and should use the new AHA ranking of the 10 diets, the scientific statement was written for physicians, Gardner said. The goal is to get doctors up to speed, since nutrition is not often prioritized in medical school.
“It’s a cheat sheet for doctors,” Gardner said. “When they do ask about diet — which I don’t think is all that often — and a patient says, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m paleo. I’m vegan. I’m keto or I’m DASH,’ I don’t think they really know what that means.”
That’s absolutely true, said preventive cardiologist Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver.
“We surveyed 1,000 cardiologists five or six years ago, and it turns out about 90% of us know almost nothing about nutrition,” said Freeman, who was not involved with developing the AHA statement.
Yet patients need their doctors to be discussing nutrition with them during regular checkups, Freeman added.
“If you asked me in my heart of hearts do I think we should have been banging the drum about nutrition for the last 100 years? Yes. So every time we can bang the drum a little more, I’m always in favor,” he said.
Now, with a color-coded chart in hand, doctors will be better informed to discuss the foods on those diets and which to emphasize, limit or avoid, Gardner said. Instead of talking about the benefits of specific heart-healthy nutrients and foods, advice should focus on a overall pattern of eating.
“When it was a single heart-healthy nutrient, you could just inject that nutrient into food and claim it’s healthy food, which it wasn’t,” he said. “Or if there’s a superfood like chia seeds, you could take a really unhealthy food and sprinkle chia seeds on it and say, ‘Ah, I’m now protected.’ No, it needs to be part of an overall healthy pattern of foods.”
To that point, Gardner stressed that each diet in the rankings was evaluated as it was intended to be eaten, not as people might actually do in real life. The new statement provides information on how doctors might counsel patients who are not eating as optimally as possible, either due to cost, lack of time or other stresses.
However, fixing those concerns may take more than individual willpower, Freeman said.
“It’s hard to adhere to a diet in a society which allows ultraprocessed comfort foods like bacon-on-a-stick to be the norm, and asking society to change a major tenant of everyday living is going to be very challenging,” he said.
“But I would also tell you the plant-based food movement is the fastest-growing food movement in the country,” he said. “So there’s hope.”
by tyler | Apr 27, 2023 | CNN, health
The percentage of adults who smoked cigarettes in the United States fell to a historic low last year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. However, e-cigarettes are becoming even more popular.
About 11% of adults told the CDC last year that they were current cigarette smokers, according to the latest preliminary data from the National Health Interview Survey, a biannual survey that provides general information about health-related topics. The survey includes responses from 27,000 people age 18 and older. In 2020 and 2021, about 12.5% of adults said they smoked cigarettes.
This is a significant drop from when surveys like these started. Surveys of Americans in the 1940s found that about half of all adults said they smoked cigarettes. Rates began to decline in the 1960s, and more recently, in 2016, 15.5% of adults said they smoked cigarettes.
Recent studies have shown some groups are still at higher risk. While the latest CDC survey doesn’t capture this level of detail, cigarette smoking rates among some communities – including Native Americans, Alaska Natives and members of the LGBTQ community remain “alarmingly high” according to the 2023 State of Tobacco Control report from the American Lung Association.
The general drop in cigarette smoking among adults should have a positive impact on public health.
Cigarette smoking is still the leading cause of preventable death and disability in the US. So many people have died from smoking, the CDC finds, that more than 10 times as many US citizens have died prematurely from cigarette smoking than have died in all the wars fought by the US.
Smokers are 90% of the lung cancer cases in the United States, but smoking can also cause someone to have a stroke, coronary heart disease, and COPD, as well as other cancers including bladder, colon, kidney, liver, stomach and other cancers. People who live with smokers also are at a greater risk of death, because of secondhand smoke.
This latest survey does not capture why fewer people smoked cigarettes, but the number has been on the decline since the 1960s, after the US surgeon general released the first report on smoking and health that concluded that smoking causes serious health problems.
Experts credit a variety of efforts for the decline in cigarette smoking – anti-smoking campaigns, programs that educate children about the danger of smoking, laws that severely restrict where people could smoke and where cigarette companies could advertise, as well as better access to smoking cessation programs and higher taxes that make cigarettes expensive.
However, Congress hasn’t raised federal tobacco taxes in 14 years. The federal cigarette tax remains $1.01 per pack, and taxes vary for other tobacco products. No state increased its cigarette taxes in 2022.
Still, the culture has changed. Smoking is much less socially acceptable in some cultures in the US.
E-cigarette use, though, seems to be more socially acceptable, especially among younger people studies show, and that may explain why those numbers are up.
The current survey found that e-cigarette use rose to nearly 6% last year, that’s up from about 4.9% the year before.
Some argue that e-cigarettes are a good substitute for regular cigarettes, and in some countries they are even promoted as a smoking cessation devices, but the CDC says that “e-cigarettes are not safe for youth, young adults, and pregnant women, as well as adults who do not currently use tobacco products.”
A BMJ study published in February found that people who used e-cigarettes to quit smoking found them to be less helpful than more traditional smoking cessation aids.
The US Food and Drug Administration says there is not enough evidence to support claims that these products are effective tools to help people quit smoking. None are approved for this purpose. The FDA says there are no safe tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, vapes, and other electronic nicotine delivery systems.
E-cigarettes can produce a number of chemicals that are not good for human health, including acrolein, acetaldehyde, and formaldehyde. These chemicals are known as aldehydes and can cause lung and heart disease, according to the American Lung Association.
Among teens, nicotine exposure can harm the developing brain, according to the US surgeon general.
E-cigarettes are much more popular than cigarettes among teens, so the adult e-cigarette user numbers will likely continue to grow.
About 14% of high school students said they used e-cigarettes, and 2% of high school students smoked cigarettes last year, according to separate CDC data.
The rate of kids that use e-cigarettesis high, the American Academy of Pediatrics says.
Specifically, in 2022, nearly 5% of middle school and about 17% of high school students reported some form of current tobacco use, according to CDC data from an earlier survey. In 2021, about 11% of middle schoolers and 34% of high schoolers said they had ever tried tobacco.
These “try rates” are important because most adult smokers started at young ages, according to the CDC.
The AAP continues to encourage pediatricians to screen for tobacco use as part of a child’s regular checkup. A talk about tobacco should start no later than age 11 or 12, the report says.
For adult smokers, the CDC encourages encourages people to call 1-800-QUIT-NOW where people can get free confidential coaching. The government also offers free online resources and even text programs that can help people quit.
