Epidemiology and occupational lung disease (1975)

This textbook chapter by W. Keith C. Morgan reviews methods for studying occupational lung disease in working populations. It does not report a new study, and it does not mention asbestos. Its examples are coal miners, coal workers' pneumoconiosis and silicosis. The chapter described cross-sectional and longitudinal field surveys and their three usual tools: a standard respiratory symptom questionnaire such as the British Medical Research Council's, lung function tests (mainly spirometry), and chest X-rays. It noted that a person's lung function readings may differ by 5 to 10 per cent or more depending on which spirometer is used, and that ethnic differences in lung function may be as large as 10 to 15 per cent. It described the 12-point scale for grading dust shadows on chest X-rays and stressed that reading these films is subjective. The author cited earlier work by the author's own group: film quality can change prevalence and progression rates by as much as 50 per cent, and lay readers can be trained to read films. The author concluded that readers and X-ray techniques must be standardized before rates from different studies can be compared.

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. 002826.

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.