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January 4th, 2017:

A Warning to Pet Owners Who Use E-Cigarettes (Video)

Jan 4th, 2017
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As we roll into 2017, we’re sure that cutting back on smoking is at the top of a lot of people’s to-do lists. We applaud this New Year’s resolution, especially since secondhand smoke can contribute to cancer, respiratory disease and heart disease in dogs, and is associated with an increased risk of some types of cancer in cats. But if you use e-cigarettes, be sure to keep them closed away so pets cannot access them.

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/a-warning-to-pet-owners-who-use-e-cigarettes-video.html

The problem with e-cigarettes is that they are filled with concentrated liquid nicotine, which can poison your pet. To put it in perspective, most tobacco cigarettes contain between eight and 40 milligrams of nicotine per cigarette, while e-cigarettes may contain up to 80 milligrams of nicotine per teaspoon of liquid. That’s a big difference — and a big danger to pets who might ingest the flavored liquids.

Check out the video below to learn more about the dangers of e-cigarettes, the signs of nicotine poisoning and what to do if your pet is exposed to liquid nicotine.

<iframe src=”http://cdnapi.kaltura.com/p/641622/sp/64162200/embedIframeJs/uiconf_id/29033621/partner_id/641622?iframeembed=true&playerId=vs-vid-player-i558a6297236846af93743c050fb83223&entry_id=1_mr08eo6b&flashvars[streamerType]=auto” width=”560″ height=”395″ allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozAllowFullScreen frameborder=”0″></iframe>

Fewer see e-cigarettes as less harmful than cigarettes

Jan 4th, 2017
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The perception that e-cigarettes are less harmful than regular cigarettes fell between 2012 and 2014, a sign that fewer people see them as a safe alternative to smoking tobacco, a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health suggests.

In 2012, the study found, half of those surveyed thought e-cigarettes were less harmful than cigarettes. By 2014, the number had dropped to 43 percent. During this period, advertisers often represented e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes, the researchers note. E-cigarettes are battery-operated devices that convert liquid containing nicotine into vapor that consumers inhale.

The study was based on the Health Information National Trends Surveys conducted by the National Cancer Institute. The nationally representative sample included smokers, former smokers and non-smokers. The study appears online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The researchers were surprised by the findings, given the mixed assessments of e-cigarettes’ risk compared to traditional tobacco products. Since they were introduced to the U.S. market in 2007, the devices have been pitched to consumers as potentially safer alternatives to cigarettes, or even a harmless way to stop smoking, given that e-cigarettes contain no tobacco, a known carcinogen that also causes pulmonary and heart disease.

On the other hand, some in public health fear that e-cigarettes could become a gateway to smoking tobacco for young people. Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the world.

“It’s a good thing that information about e-cigarettes’ possible adverse health effects has gotten out there, especially considering there wasn’t a government or public health push during the study years,” says study leader Eric W. Ford, PhD, MPH, a professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Health Policy and Management. “When misinformation about health effects about any substances becomes widespread, it is usually very hard to reverse the trend. That somehow happened here.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 3.7 percent of U.S. adults were using e-cigarettes in 2014. E-cigarettes were more likely to be used by current cigarette smokers and former smokers who quit smoking within the past year than former smokers who quit smoking more than 1 year ago and those who had never smoked.

There is no overriding consensus among researchers about whether e-cigarettes are indeed harmful to human health. There are, Ford explains, two research knowns. On the one hand, e-cigarettes eliminate many of the carcinogenic elements associated with smoking tobacco. On the other hand, e-cigarettes may include flavorings and other ingredients containing the chemical diacetyl, which can cause bronchiolitis obliterans, or “popcorn lung,” the thickening and narrowing of the airways due to scarring of the lung’s air sacs. (The condition was so named because diacetyl was once used as a butter flavoring for microwavable popcorn.)

Earlier this year, in a much-anticipated move, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would start regulating e-cigarettes the same way it regulates cigarettes – including banning their sale to anyone under age 18. The FDA has not yet proposed additional regulations around e-cigarettes. Earlier this month, in the government’s strongest warning to date, the U.S. Surgeon General urged young people to avoid e-cigarettes altogether, calling them “unsafe.” Among children, teens and young adults, e-cigarettes are the most commonly used nicotine product.

For the study, the researchers combined three “cycles” of data from the 2012, 2013 and 2014 Health Information National Trends Survey, an annual survey of U.S. households sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. The surveys, which included 3,630 respondents in 2012, 3,185 in 2013 and 3,677 in 2014, were made up of about 60 percent non-smokers, 20 percent former smokers and 20 percent current smokers. The study also found that awareness of e-cigarettes jumped from 77.1 percent in 2012 to 94.3 percent in 2014.

The researchers also looked at whether awareness of e-cigarettes among current smokers influenced their attempts at quitting or intention to quit. They found no association. While some smokers may independently use e-cigarettes to try and quit, doctors are not advising patients to do so. They typically suggest trying nicotine patches or chewing gum.

Smokers who perceived e-cigarettes as less harmful than traditional cigarettes were less likely to have attempted to quit in the previous year.

Kingston University academics play key part in project to devise smartphone app that uses games technology to help smokers kick the habit

Jan 4th, 2017
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http://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/article/1765/04-jan-2017-kingston-university-academics-play-key-part-in-project-to-devise-smartphone-app-that-uses-games/

A smartphone app that could help smokers stick to New Year’s resolutions to quit by playing games to combat cravings has been developed by academics at Kingston University and Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). Cigbreak Free was the brainchild of games creation processes lecturer Hope Caton, from Kingston University’s School of Computer Science and Mathematics, and Robert Walton, Professor of Primary Medical Care at QMUL.

Ms Caton – who has extensive experience in video games, having worked on global hit TombRaider IV: The Last Revelation – teamed up with Professor Walton to see if they could combine a fun gaming experience with educational health messages to help smokers fight the urge to light up.

The result of the collaboration between the two universities was an app that works like a regular smartphone game, with players having to complete tasks to progress through levels, gaining rewards and gold stars along the way. However, it also incorporates a combination of some 37 behavioural change techniques – theory-based methods for changing behaviour – selected by QMUL health psychologists to help smokers quit, Ms Caton explained. “People think games are frivolous but we learn a lot through play,” she said. “The good thing about a smartphone gaming app is that you can play it anywhere.

“Craving is a short-term thing, so if you get a craving at 11am, you can play the game in the warm until it passes, rather than going out into the cold for a cigarette. You’ve also got something to do with your hands other than smoke.”

In the game, players have to swipe a certain number of cigarettes to break them within a time limit. As well as progressing through levels, the app includes a quit journal where users can calculate how much money they are saving. There are also mini-games where players have to clear smoke from a room to reveal a health message.

The app has now been commissioned for use by five London boroughs – Kingston, Kensington and Chelsea, Hammersmith and Fulham, Tower Hamlets and the City of Westminster – as part of their public health smoking cessation services. Residents can download it, enter their postcode and use the app for free, with several hundred people having downloaded Cigbreak Free so far.

Ms Caton and Professor Walton were authors of a recent research study published in the British Medical Journal, which analysed the use of behaviour change techniques and game-like elements in health apps currently on the market. They found that very few of the health apps they looked at were using games to help people make positive health changes.

The development of the app was inspired by a desire to exploit the latest trends in gaming to help improve people’s health, according to Professor Walton, from QMUL.

“Some of the health messages and behaviour change techniques we have used in the game are based on our previous research and include showing players the health consequences of a behaviour, gaining points for grabbing healthy items, or providing virtual financial incentives.

“We’re essentially trying to ‘gamify’ these messages and techniques as a way of embedding them in a person’s mind, in the hope that they will then be able to quit smoking.”

Rewards in the game were a way of giving smokers instant positive feedback, Ms Caton added. “When you’re trying to quit smoking you don’t get much instant feedback except desire. Your health is better but somehow it doesn’t have the same effect as being told you’re winning or getting a gold star,” she explained.

“We had to find subtle ways to include health messages so they don’t turn people off from playing, so the medical team ran 10 focus groups with 120 people to find out what worked and what didn’t.”

The team’s research is now being incorporated within teaching at Kingston University, as part of digital smoking cessation intervention work led by associate professor Dr Darrel Greenhill. Students on the University’s postgraduate game development courses are helping build the next upgrade for the app, using analytics gathered from users to inform improvements to gameplay – with the aim of providing more personalised support to help smokers quit.

“It’s really good experience for our Masters students to be able to work together on projects such as this as part of their digital studio practice module,” said Dr Greenhill, course director for the University’s game development programmes. “Our courses have been developed in consultation with representatives from the likes of Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe and Telefonica Europe. This insight, along with the opportunity to work with clients on real-world game development, helps provide them with the vital skills needed when seeking employment in the digital media industry.”

In January – a key time for smokers to make the resolution to quit – the team will begin a three-month pilot study with app users to evaluate its effectiveness. “The next step for us is to prove quit rates,” Ms Caton said. “We’ve had people smoking 25 cigarettes a day quit, some who’ve gone from 25 to four. It shows it can be effective but we need to get the analytics into the app to get more data and that’s something we’re working on now.”