Pneumoconioses (1965)

This book chapter was a review of published research on how lung diseases caused by inhaled dust (pneumoconioses) affect lung function. It sorted mineral-dust diseases into four groups by how much dust and scarring (fibrosis) the lungs held, and also covered organic-dust diseases such as byssinosis. For asbestosis, the chapter reported from earlier studies a general reduction in lung volume, especially vital capacity. It described a decrease in diffusing capacity as an invariable finding, and an increase in the alveolar-arterial oxygen difference as the most consistent change. It noted that the pleural reaction in asbestosis ranged from pleural adhesions to dense fibrous pleurisy and, in some kinds of exposure, mesothelioma. A table gave lung-function results for three South African gold miners with silicosis. The author concluded that the physiological changes in the different pneumoconioses generally matched what the known pathology would predict, but that guessing about an individual case could not replace direct measurement.

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 pages from a book 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.