A new study compared e-cigarettes to nicotine patches to see if it is as safe and effective in helping smokers quit the habit.

Arguments of whether e-cigarettes could really help people quit smoking have been ongoing with some people being skeptic of its ability to make people drop real cigarettes and tobacco.

Chris Bullen, lead author of the study from New Zealand's University of Auckland, and his colleagues recruited 657 smokers who wanted to quit for the trial. These participants were divided into three groups: 292 were given e-cigarettes with 16mg of nicotine, 292 were handed nicotine patches, while the rest were provided e-cigarettes under placebo.

The trial ran for 13 weeks wherein 5.7 percent of the participants eventually quitted smoking before the monitoring ended.

At the end of the trial, 7.3 percent of the e-cigarettes users stopped smoking while it was 5.8 percent for the nicotine patch users. Those under placebo had 4.1 percent.

The researchers admitted that there was no significant difference between the e-cigarette users and nicotine patch users in terms of helping people quit smoking. However, their study was able to prove that e-cigarettes are not that far from the effect that nicotine patches provide.

"While our results don't show any clear-cut differences... in terms of quit success after six months, it certainly seems that e-cigarettes were more effective in helping smokers who didn't quit to cut down," Bullen said in an interview with Reuters.

About 92 percent of the participants also commented that they prefer using e-cigarettes than the nicotine patches and will recommend it to their family and friends.

The researchers also looked at the cigarette consumption of the two groups and found that there was a better improvement on the e-cigarette users. About 57 percent of the e-cigarette users have reduced their cigarette consumption by 50 percent after six months while it was only 40 percent for the nicotine patch users.

“It’s not like this is a magic bullet,” Bullen told Bloomberg. “If you continue to smoke, obviously that’s not ideal, but it’s something that’s a stepping-stone toward quitting. We just have to be a little patient. They’ve been doing it for most of their lives, and it’s not surprising they find it incredibly hard.”

The study was published in the Lancet.