The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in coordination with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), released federal data from the 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) on e-cigarette use among U.S. youth. The findings, published in Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report, show that youth use of e-cigarettes remains high, with 2.5 million (9.4%) of the nation’s middle and high school students reporting current e-cigarette use.
The study, which was conducted January-May 2022 using an online survey, shows that overall about 1 in 10 U.S. middle (3.3%) and high (14.1%) school students reported current (in the past 30 days) e-cigarette use. Among these youth e-cigarette users, nearly 85% reported using flavored e-cigarettes, and more than 1 in 4 (27.6%) reported daily use of an e-cigarette. Due to changes in methodology, including differences in survey administration and data collection procedures in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to compare estimates from 2022 with those from prior NYTS waves is limited; differences between estimates might be due to changes in methodology, actual behavior, or both.
Among current youth e-cigarette users, the most commonly used device type was disposables. The top three brands that current youth e-cigarette users reported “usually” using were Puff Bar (14.5%), Vuse (12.5%), and Hyde (5.5%). While Puff Bar and Vuse were pre-specified response options on the survey, Hyde was not. Students wrote in Hyde as their preferred brand, and because of this, the reported percentage of use is likely an underestimate.
FDA release
