Carcinogenesis of the Lung: Environmental and Host Factors

This book chapter by Paul Kotin reviewed how lung cancer develops, using population, animal and tissue studies. It described the major portion of the rise in lung cancer deaths over the past half-century as absolute, not merely relative. It named three main areas of suspected cause: cigarette smoking, city living, and the workplace. The author wrote that workplace exposures perhaps accounted for the fewest cases. The chapter proposed that repeated injury and repair of the airway lining, in the presence of a cancer-causing substance, favored malignant change. Repetition could lead from overgrowth of lining cells to changed cell types, atypical cells and ultimately cancer. It also cited reports that uranium miners' lung tumors were mainly undifferentiated small cell tumors, and that liver injury increased the cancer response of mice to benzo(a)pyrene. The author wrote that reducing any of these factors could be expected to lower lung cancer rates. However, the author held that predicting the size of the drop from removing only one factor was meaningless, given the many factors involved. The scanned text was badly damaged, and no mention of asbestos could be read.

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.