Section 3: Pleural Effusions

This text is a section on pleural effusions (fluid around the lungs) from a book chapter on organ involvement in asbestos-related disease. It is a review of published descriptions, not a new study. It stated that effusions related to asbestos exposure may result from bronchogenic carcinoma, mesothelioma, cor pulmonale due to pulmonary fibrosis, or so-called benign asbestos effusion. The diagnostic criteria for benign asbestos effusion it gave were a prior history of asbestos exposure, no other predisposing cause, and spontaneous remission. In the author's opinion this diagnosis is fraught with hazard, because an effusion may be present for months or years before a diagnosis of mesothelioma. The section cited a series by Gaensler and Kaplan in which effusions were one-sided in 3 patients and two-sided in 9. It noted that noncalcified pleural plaques are reported in less than 50 percent of cases in most radiological series, which the author considered probably an understatement. The author concluded that people diagnosed with benign asbestos pleural effusion need repeated later checks so that mesothelioma is not missed. Much of the scanned text was unreadable.

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 is a copy from J-M's medical library.

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.