Editors’ Note

We are pleased to inform our readers that Dr Tryggve Ljung has accepted our invitation to join the Advisory Board of our Journal. He has been welcomed by his colleagues in this group recently. Dr Ljung received his medical training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. After several years of working in the pharmaceutical industry, he joined Swedish Match as Vice President Scientific Affairs in 2018. His field of research as one of our peers is mainly New Products, especially smokeless tobacco products (snus, snuff, chewing tobacco and nicotine pouches).

These products are becoming increasingly popular among consumers and, as a consequence, also for the tobacco industry. In our Editorial (Issue No. 1 of Volume 30) of March 2021, on the occasion of changing the title of the Journal, we wrote:

“In the last 10 to 15 years, a number of so called ‘new generation’ tobacco and nicotine products have been introduced, including heat-not-burn tobacco products, electronic cigarettes, oral tobacco products and oral nicotine delivery (OND) products. All these products aim to significantly reduce the number of toxicants the consumer is exposed to, while maintaining the desired properties and effects of flavor and nicotine”.

Against this background, Tryggve Ljung ideally completes the scientific expertise of our Board.

In this context we would like to refer to the two manuscripts by Dr Romana Rytsar et al. that we publish in this issue. They outline different scenarios of possible consequences for Public Health in Germany if cigarette smokers had switched to heat-not-burn products or e-cigarettes between 1995 and 2015. Following a general examination of various options of switching to these reduced-risk products in the first manuscript, the second manuscript provides an analysis of the impact on higher and lower socio-economic groups in Germany.