Medical Students’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Perceptions Toward Vaping and E-Cigarette Use: An Assessment of Their Education and Preparedness
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authorsstrong work and interesting survey that is quite comprehensive in terms of questioning. i would recommend adding a section in the discussion that focuses on medical education itself and how medical schools could implement more about e-vaping, using examples of what is currently being taught + suggestions for improvement beyond just saying more exposure to it. also, include more discussion about what a medical school itself can do to help with coping early on in medical education. look up literature about what is done to relieve stress in this field and maybe how e-vaping can be targeted with any interventions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear Authors,
Very interesting topic, paper was very useful to be read. As vaping gets more popular worldwide, it is essential to know all its risk factors. In your cross-sectional study on 5794 students, it was shown that there is a gap in vaping medical education that all we should get over. Introduction provides sufficient data related to the topic, methodology and results are well presented and discussion is sufficient, strenghten with relevant conclusions.
Best regards,
Reviewer
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis paper, as written, will be of little interest to readers. There are several problems:
- In the past ten years, the tobacco/nicotine marketplace has exploded with a wide range of now-popular nicotine delivery (and THC delivery) products. These include, but are not limited to cigarettes, cigarillos, water pipes, cigars, vape devices delivering nicotine, THC or no active ingredient, and snus products, some of which contain tobacco, while others contain nicotine but no tobacco. Thus, a paper limiting itself to “vape products” is of limited value.
- The product now on the market vary widely in addictiveness, risk of lung damage and risk of other serious chronic disease.
- Nicotine-based vape products are not risk-free, but are much lower in risk than cigarettes. Thus, the general recommendations should be – if you are not using any nicotine product, don’t start, but, if you are a smoker, switching to a vape product will lower your risk of cancer, heart and lung disease. This, is, in fact, referenced within the paper.
- The current tobacco-control policy, in the US and some other countries is anti-all-things-tobacco, based on the false premise that use of any nicotine-delivery product is likely to lead to increases in cigarette smoking, with life-long addiction and substantial increased risk of heart and lung disease and cancer. Current policy does not support tobacco harm reduction as a valuable component of tobacco control programming to substantially reduce risk of addiction and life-threatening disease, despite ample evidence of potential benefit.
This paper does show that med students get no education regarding vaping, and, likely no education regarding other tobacco, nicotine and THC related products. The survey data show that the med student’s knowledge is not much different than the general population.
Thus, while the survey data was limited to vape products, the recommendation should be made that a comprehensive tobacco/nicotine/THC module should be added to the medical school curriculum.
The Introduction, Discussion and Conclusions should be amended to reflect the above-mentioned concerns. The last full line of the abstract should replace “vaping-related” with “tobacco/nicotine/THC related.” Limitation of the survey data to vape products should be explained as a way to simplify the survey, and thus, better secure a good response to the survey.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
