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Professor Rachel Isba listed the flavours of the colourful vapes sitting on her desk at the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. “Pineapple ice” and “exotic fruit” were among her extensive collection.
Since January, Isba has been treating children as young as 11 who are nicotine dependent as a result of vaping, at the first NHS clinic of its kind in England.
If successful, she is hopeful a form of her pilot clinic could be rolled out across the country to help tackle the growing problem.
It is illegal to sell vapes to Britons under the age of 18 but a quarter of 11 to 15-year-olds have tried vaping and almost one in 10 “frequently” vape, according to a report published by NHS England in October.
While policymakers acknowledge that vaping can be helpful for adults who are trying to reduce or quit smoking, most children using vapes have never smoked cigarettes and are attracted by vapes’ sweet flavours and colourful packaging.
“There are two bits of harm when it comes to vaping among young people,” said Isba in an interview with the Financial Times. “The first is the impact of nicotine on the adolescent brain and the other is that we don’t know in the long term what the physical act of vaping will have on lungs that are still developing.”
The nicotine replacement therapy she is offering the children at the clinic involves a combination of nicotine patches and gum.
“We don’t really know what we should do to support children as there is no evidence base,” she said. “So I am working with these young people to understand how we can best do this.”
One of the questions used to assess their levels of addiction is how long it takes them to vape after waking up in the morning. Isba said she had heard some children admit to vaping while still in bed.
“It’s such a massive elephant in the room and we might not want to think about it but these young people want help,” she said.
The clinic in Liverpool offers what it describes as a “holistic approach”, working closely with each child or young person to explore their level of nicotine dependency and give them options to help reduce the amount they vape.
Isba believes it is a “really difficult” time to be a child in this country. “If you are a 12-year-old the messages are mixed, your mum might have come from hospital and been told they need to stop smoking cigarettes and vaping might help them. But what we know is that nicotine is not good for adolescent brains and that vaping is unlikely to be risk free.”
Nicotine can harm brain development, as well as lead to mood and attention problems.
If passed, the UK government’s tobacco and vapes bill will ban all advertising and sponsorship for vaping products, bringing them into line with tobacco, and restrict the flavours, display and packaging of all types of vapes.
Ministers are also considering extending bans on vaping to areas where smoking bans already operate under new legislation aimed at phasing out smoking entirely for the next generation.
Disposable vapes will be banned in England and Wales from this summer as part of a drive to protect children’s health and curb what ministers have described as a “throwaway culture”.
“The tobacco and vapes bill is a really positive step and will change things from this point onwards but what we don’t have is a plan for the probably tens of thousands of children who are nicotine dependent as a result of vaping now,” said Isba.
“We don’t know the long term impacts of vaping in the same way we didn’t know smoking was catastrophically bad for you”, she added. “History repeats itself.”
Last month, the government announced a £62mn research project which will track the health of 100,000 young people aged 8 to 18 over a decade.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are not prepared to stand by and allow a new generation of kids to get hooked on nicotine, which is why we’ve announced a landmark study to investigate the long-term effects of vaping on young people’s health and wellbeing.
