Clinical-pathologic approach to diffuse infiltrative lung disease (1978)

This book chapter by Carrington and Gaensler was a review of how clinicians and pathologists diagnose chronic diffuse infiltrative lung disease. It drew on the authors' own referral files and was illustrated with five patient cases. The authors reported 1,234 such cases on file, 21.2% of all referrals seen during the previous 25 years. Their classification table listed 115 cases of asbestosis, not counting survey cases. Among 508 patients who had lung biopsy, 7.7% had a normal chest X-ray, and these included patients with asbestosis. The first case was a 40-year-old policeman whose lung biopsy was first interpreted as usual interstitial pneumonia. It later emerged that 17 years earlier he had worked for 3 months at a paper plant where cigarette filter paper was made by mixing acetate with "Cape Blue" asbestos, although he had always worn a mask. When the tissue was reviewed, asbestos bodies were readily found on sections stained for iron. The authors concluded that a detailed environmental and occupational history matters as much to the pathologist as to the clinician, and they stressed close collaboration between the two. They noted that their experience was likely weighted by their special interests.

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.