# Remote, Young Adult Lay-Counselor Delivered Behavioral and Digital Intervention for Youth to Promote Vaping Cessation and Prevent Escalation of Tobacco Use

> **NIH NIH R01** · MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL · 2024 · $849,268

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
While tobacco smoking has declined dramatically among adolescents and is now almost rare, the prevalence
of electronic nicotine delivery device (ENDS, nicotine vaping) use has risen rapidly, fueled by social media
promotion, innovative product engineering, and advertising, and effectively reversing five decades of progress
in youth tobacco control. The increase in high school vaping from 2017-18 was the largest one-year increase in
any substance used over the 44 years that Monitoring the Future has tracked adolescent substance use. In
2019, 26% of U.S. high school seniors reported past month vaping, a 5% increase from 2018, with the
sharpest inflection in vaping initiation at around age 16. Most youth who initiate ENDS use have never smoked
tobacco; however, nicotine vaping is associated with subsequent initiation of tobacco smoking. This is of high
public health importance because high school aged adolescents are in the developmental period with the
highest lifetime vulnerability for drug use to progress to entrenched addictive patterns. Thus ENDS use puts
adolescents at high risk for nicotine addiction, escalation to entrenched combusted tobacco, multiple tobacco
product, and other drug addiction, in addition to negative health effects of vapor exposure. Recent surveys
indicate that over half of adolescents who vape nicotine want to quit, but there are no known effective
treatments to aid the millions of U.S. adolescents who have begun to vape nicotine to quit. There is growing
consensus that effective interventions are needed for adolescents with pre-addiction, operationalized as mild to
moderate substance use disorder, with the rationale that early interventions could prevent escalation to often
lifelong patterns of drug use. Thus, here we propose to enroll adolescents with at least once weekly vaping in
the past month, whose mild severity of use would exclude them from most cessation clinical trials. Because
vaping has become so prevalent in high schools at a time of unprecedented behavioral health workforce
shortage, effective interventions that are scalable into school and community settings are needed. We
designed QuitVaping to be a fully remote, digital and behavioral intervention, grounded in Cognitive Behavioral,
Social Cognitive and Dissonance Theory to be developmentally appropriate for mid and late adolescent
tobacco vaping cessation. QuitVaping is delivered over twelve 20-minute sessions by young adult lay
counselors. QuitVaping has high satisfaction ratings, retention, and abstinence rates in preliminary testing in
adolescents with established nicotine dependence. Here we propose to test QuitVaping to promote nicotine
vaping cessation in youth who vape as little as at least once a weekly, and thus are at risk for progression
along the spectrum of addictive disorders, with no, mild or moderate dependence on vaped nicotine, thus
meeting criteria for pre-addiction. To maximize generalizability, the trial will...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10951059
- **Project number:** 1R01CA287721-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
- **Principal Investigator:** A EDEN EVINS
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $849,268
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-09-06 → 2029-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10951059

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10951059, Remote, Young Adult Lay-Counselor Delivered Behavioral and Digital Intervention for Youth to Promote Vaping Cessation and Prevent Escalation of Tobacco Use (1R01CA287721-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10951059. Licensed CC0.

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