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Record W4416347600 · doi:10.1101/2025.11.12.25340079

Trends in youth use of non-cigarette tobacco products in England, Canada, and the US and the impact of England’s menthol cigarette ban on use

2025· preprint· en· W4416347600 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Yamma Khalid Aria, Sarah E. Jackson, David Hammond, Jessica L. Reid, Eve Taylor, Madeleine Ebdon, Harry Tattan‐Birch, Masuma Pervin Mishu, Jamie Brown, Lion Shahab, Sharon Cox, Katherine East

Bibliographic record

VenuemedRxiv · 2025
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicSmoking Behavior and Cessation
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersHealth CanadaMinistry of Health, British ColumbiaNational Cancer InstituteCancer Research UKNational Institutes of HealthPfizerRoswell Park Cancer Institute
KeywordsMentholTobacco productProduct (mathematics)Tobacco useTobacco controlTobacco industryCigarette smoking

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Introduction: In England, non-cigarette tobacco products (e.g., cigarillos, cigars, waterpipes, bidis, smokeless tobacco, heated tobacco) are subject to fewer regulatory restrictions than cigarettes/rolling tobacco. This study assessed trends in youth use of these products in England, Canada, and the US, focussing on evaluating the impact of England's May 2020 ban on menthol in cigarettes but not non-cigarette tobacco. Methods: Data were from the ITC Youth Tobacco and Vaping Survey (16-19-year-olds; N=129,575) across ten waves (2017-2024). Segmented regressions assessed changes in trends of non-cigarette tobacco products before vs. after May 2020, adjusting for race/ethnicity/sex/age. Results: In England, non-cigarette tobacco use increased similarly before (aOR=1.16,1.02-1.31) and after (1.13,1.07-1.20) the ban (change in trend: 0.98,0.91-1.06), from 7.4% in 2017 and reaching in 11.6% in 2024. In contrast, non-cigarette tobacco use decreased similarly before and after the ban in both the US (pre-ban: 0.82, 0.73-0.93; post-ban: 0.84,0.80-0.89; change in trend: 1.02,0.94-1.11; from 10.2% reaching 7.1%), and Canada (pre-ban: 0.84,0.76-0.93; post-ban: 0.90,0.86-0.94; from 9.2% reaching 7.9%), although the decline in Canada after the ban was slightly slower (1.07,1.001-1.15). Cigarillo, cigar, and smokeless tobacco use specifically increased to a greater extent in England than Canada and the US. Conclusions: Between 2017 and 2024, youth non-cigarette tobacco product use increased in England and surpassed declining use in Canada and the US. There was little evidence that England's menthol cigarette ban accelerated increases, although increases highlight the need for comprehensive regulations encompassing all tobacco products in England.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.016
Threshold uncertainty score0.113

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.284
Teacher spread0.250 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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