Vaping is common for those who left smoking tobacco within the past five years rather than for those who left a decade or more ago.
The new findings are revealed online in the journal Tobacco Control.
The authors suggest that today's smokers who want to quit are using e-cigarettes as an aid whereas in the past quitters had to rely on other smoking cessation aids, so few long-standing quitters have tried e-cigarettes.
And it appears that smokers find e-cigarettes a useful and effective quitting aid, as current users of e-cigarettes are more likely to be recent quitters than non-users, and some successful quitters then stop using e-cigarettes.
As e-cigarettes are consumer products and are generally used without medical supervision or support, there have been concerns that vaping may become an adjunct or replacement for smoking tobacco products.
Numerous studies have tried to determine whether e-cigarettes help smokers quit, but they have produced conflicting results.
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To gain a better understanding of e-cigarette use by current and former smokers, researchers accessed data on 13,057 people (6904 current and 6153 former smokers) from 28 member states who were interviewed face-to-face about their tobacco and e-cigarette use for a special 2017 Eurobarometer cross-sectional survey.
Eurobarometer surveys are performed regularly at the request of the European Commission to measure population attitudes on different issues in EU member states.
Current daily e-cigarette use was reported by 2.4% of current and 3.3% of former smokers interviewed, while former daily use was reported by 5.6% and 1.9% respectively.
The authors conclude that current daily e-cigarette use was strongly associated with recent (5 or fewer years) smoking cessation in the study of current and former smokers in EU member states.
"Former daily e-cigarette use was positively associated with smoking cessation of 2 or fewer years indicating that some smokers may have quit with e-cigarettes and then quit e-cigarette use too," they wrote.