The Member Statements Forum is dedicated to venting comments made by members of the Advisory Committee. The Members Statements Forum may be accessed by clicking on the aforementioned title in the box to the right of this article.
To this end Dr. Henningfield made the following statement at the March 30, 2010 meeting:
DR. HENNINGFIELD:
Thank you. There is three areas that you have covered, initiation, dependence, and cessation; and I have a question that’s really the same for all of them.
In all of these each of these areas each of you show one or more studies that show no, what I will call, adverse effects, like increased initiation. And one or more studies that showed the increased adverse affect. And I’m trying to get a sense –I approach this not thinking what’s right or what’s wrong; they are documented. So I’m trying to get a sense of what information you also had that you didn’t have time that would bear on that?
So Dr. Rising, on the switching, in the Kaiser study found four times people were four times more likely to switch to menthol than the other way around. Depending on the extent of that, if that’s at the expense of cessation, then that’s a serious public health concern. But the other study show no affect. So is there any information that gives us an idea of what is happening in the population, how frequently people switch; and if switching is at the expense of cessation?
DR. RISING:
In general, not tons of information on that.
Kind of other caveats I would give with that information is, you know, so that study data was from 1979 to 1986. So how relevant that is to what’s going on with adults smoking menthol cigarettes today, you know, definitely kind of an open question.
Editors Note Please provide your views on these topics in the “Comments ” section below. If you have particular studies that address this concern please post them in the Members Statement Discussion Forum.
In particular CRE would like your views on whether Board deliberations on this matter should be delayed until which time the aforementioned information is made available to the public for comment.