Changes in vaping-related knowledge following the delivery of an educational intervention to university students in Mexico: a prospective follow-up study
Maria Elena Acosta- Enriquez, Nina I Mendez-Dominguez, Javier Moran- Martinez, Viviana Krystell Ramos, Genny CarrilloObjective
Assess changes in the vaping-related knowledge of Mexican university students following participation in a structured educational session.
Design
A prospective, longitudinal, one-group non-randomised, pre-test–post-test study with a 3-month follow-up.
Setting
The study was conducted between December 2023 and January 2025 at two private, teaching-oriented and professional-training-oriented universities in the Mexican states of Nuevo León and Durango.
Participants
A total of 304 undergraduate students completed the baseline and immediate postintervention participation assessments and 181 participants (59.5%) completed the 3-month follow-up assessment.
Intervention
Participants attended a standardised educational session that communicated information about nicotine addiction, vaping-related health risks and the proper environmental disposal of electronic cigarettes.
Primary and secondary outcome measures
The primary outcome was the sum of correct responses to eight scored knowledge items (raw range 0–8; one point per correct response). Secondary outcomes included changes in individual knowledge items. All inferential analyses used the raw 0–8 score; conversion to a 0–100 percentage-correct scale was used only for descriptive interpretation. Paired t tests, McNemar tests, 95% CIs and Cohen’s d effect sizes were used.
Results
Our findings show that knowledge improved across most scored knowledge items immediately after participation in the intervention and remained higher than baseline after 3 months. Specifically, mean knowledge scores increased from 4.82±1.70 at baseline to 6.53±1.64 immediately after participation in the intervention (mean difference 1.71, 95% CI 1.43 to 1.99; p<0.001; Cohen’s d=1.02) and 6.62±1.67 at follow-up (mean difference from baseline 1.85, 95% CI 1.50 to 2.20; p<0.001; Cohen’s d=1.09). No significant difference was observed between immediately postintervention and follow-up assessments (p=0.384). Attrition analyses identified no significant differences in baseline knowledge (p=0.602) or sex (p=0.321) between retained participants and those lost to follow-up.
Conclusions
Participation in a structured educational intervention was associated with significant and sustained improvements in vaping-related knowledge among participating university students. The study did not assess whether these knowledge gains translated into changes in vaping initiation, cessation or use; this requires evaluation in controlled studies with behavioural outcomes.