Asbestos and Smoking (1979)

This short JAMA editorial described 12,051 asbestos insulation workers followed from January 1, 1967, through December 31, 1976. All were at least 20 years past starting their work. Comparison men came from an American Cancer Society study and had similar backgrounds and smoking habits. Age-standardized lung cancer death rates per 100,000 man-years were 38.4 for asbestos workers who did not smoke, 122.6 for smokers who had not worked with asbestos, and 601.6 for men with both exposures. For men who neither worked with asbestos nor smoked, the scan prints 113. That cannot be right because the article says asbestos alone raises risk, and the correct figure cannot be confirmed. Five asbestos workers who never smoked died of asbestosis. Asbestosis death rates for men who smoked "pack or more" a day were 2.8 times those for men who never smoked regularly; the amount before "pack" is unreadable in the scan. Over ten years, lung cancer death rates for 2,201 men who had quit by 1967 were approximately one third of those of workmates still smoking. The authors concluded that asbestos-exposed workers should be advised never to smoke or to stop. They noted that mesothelioma would not be affected.

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. 001053.

We publish an editorial 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.