A SCOTTISH researcher has called for stricter controls to prevent what he calls dangerous claims that e-cigarettes containing nicotine can help smokers quit tobacco.

Professor Gerard Hastings, of Stirling University's Centre for Tobacco Control Research, said there is a lack of evidence electronic cigarettes actually work.

The e-cigarette industry, meanwhile, has launched a fight against moves to regulate the products as medicine, claiming it will cost the NHS billions of pounds by leading to a drop in smokers using them to quit.

In spite of this, the makers of one of the UK's leading brands of e-cigarettes has insisted they are "absolutely not" being marketed as an aid to stopping smoking.

E-cigarettes, around since 2004, are battery-powered devices that let users inhale nicotine vapours which do not contain the harmful tar and carbon monoxide found in tobacco smoke.

Hastings recently published a study commissioned by Cancer Research UK on nicotine-containing products.

The study noted that health watchdog body, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, said while little is known about the safety of e-cigarettes at present, they are likely to be less harmful than cigarettes.

But Hastings said allowing unproven claims to be made about their ability to help smokers quit was "really dangerous".

"The great risk is people start to think about these things like they are a silver bullet, and then it doesn't work," he said.

"They are at best disappointed – at worst they are completely demotivated and think: 'I can't give up'.

"It is a phoney promise if they aren't very helpful in aiding people to stop smoking – and we don't know whether they are or not.

"There are good reasons why we regulate medicines and insist that pharmaceutical companies only make claims they can prove."

The Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced in June that the Government is to regulate e-cigarettes as a medicinal product.