Asbestos-Associated Radiographic Changes Among Household Contacts of Amosite Asbestos Workers (1980)

This book chapter reported chest x-ray findings in household members of men who had worked at an amosite asbestos factory in New Jersey. Beginning in 1973, the authors examined these household contacts. They compared 685 contacts who had no asbestos job of their own with 326 urban New Jersey residents from a medical clinic in the same community, matched for age and sex. Five experienced readers scored the mixed x-rays without knowing who was in which group, using the 1971 ILO U/C classification. The household contacts had a statistically significantly higher rate of abnormalities than the comparison group, mostly of the pleura (the lung lining). The authors also grouped contacts by the year the factory worker in their household was first exposed. Where the worker's exposure began before 1945, 152 of 401 contacts had abnormalities. Where it began in 1945 or later, 27 percent of 244 contacts did. This comparison left out 34 contacts with the longest exposure. Abnormalities were also more common when the worker had been employed longer. Only two contacts had advanced lung fibrosis. The authors concluded that, given enough time after first exposure, x-ray changes from low-level asbestos exposure are mainly pleural.

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. J-M listed it in its medical library index as no. 003797.

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.