New data show more than 2.5 million U.S. youth currently use e-cigarettes
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.
