Section 6: Extrathoracic Effects of Asbestos (in Organ Involvement in Asbestos-related Disease) (1978)

This is a section of a book chapter by Leslie Preger titled "Extrathoracic Effects of Asbestos." It is a review. It reported no new study of its own but summarized published reports on effects of asbestos outside the chest. A table, which the chapter credits to Parkes, grouped these effects. Asbestos warts and peritoneal mesothelioma were listed as due to asbestos exposure. Gastrointestinal cancer, laryngeal cancer only in smokers, and hyaline sclerosis of the spleen and liver capsules were listed as probably due to it. Cancers of the blood-forming system, breast cancer and kidney cancer were among those with only sporadic reports. The author described cited studies of asbestos workers that showed excess gastrointestinal cancer, except in a Finnish group exposed to anthophyllite. Animal feeding experiments reviewed had not produced gastrointestinal cancer. A cited study of workers matched for smoking found laryngeal cancer risk confined to smokers. The author wrote that a causal role for asbestos in blood-system, breast and ovarian cancers was not yet accepted. Much of the scanned text is badly damaged.

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.