Smoker's Heart (1977)

This one-page editorial in Archives of Internal Medicine is about cigarette smoking and heart disease. It does not mention asbestos. The authors described an autopsy study reported in the journal Chest in 1976. That study covered 1,056 men who died from causes other than heart disease in a Veterans Administration hospital between 1965 and 1970. A total of 31,173 microscope sections were prepared from the men's coronary arteries and arterioles. Men who smoked two or more packs a day had more than four times more atherosclerosis than men who never smoked regularly. Advanced fibrous thickening of the coronary artery wall was found in 22.2% of two-or-more-packs-a-day smokers and 0.8% of those who never smoked. Advanced hyaline thickening of the small heart arterioles was found in 90.7% of two-or-more-packs-a-day smokers, 48.4% of one-to-two-packs-a-day smokers, and none of the men who never smoked regularly. The authors concluded that these findings may explain some discrepancies between clinical and autopsy findings, such as myocardial infarction (heart attack) without matching atherosclerosis of the larger coronary arteries.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

From J-M's medical library

This copy comes from the Johns-Manville medical library. It was among the papers J-M kept in its medical library without an index entry.

We publish an editorial for research and commentary: it shows what the medical literature in a leading asbestos company's own library said on the subject, and when. Our summary above is our own reading of it. The copyright stays with the publisher.