Pneumoconioses and related diseases (1980)

This is a chapter from the fourth edition of the textbook Diseases of the Chest (1980), not a research study. The authors reviewed the causes, diagnosis and treatment of the common pneumoconioses: silicosis, asbestos-related disease, coal workers' disease and rarer dust diseases. On asbestos, they named chrysotile as by far the most commonly used type. They wrote that pleural plaques serve as a marker of exposure to asbestos, and that asbestosis (lung scarring) commonly continues to progress after exposure ends. They wrote that the latent period for mesothelioma is almost always at least 20 to 30 years, and that observations suggested the tumor is not related to total fiber dose. Once malignant mesothelioma is diagnosed, most patients die within a year (mean of 7 months). They wrote that the excess lung cancer in asbestos workers is almost entirely among cigarette smokers, and that heavy smokers with heavy asbestos exposure may have as much as 90 times the incidence of nonsmokers without exposure. They reproduced a table of deaths among 17,800 insulation workers from Selikoff and Hammond. The authors concluded that asbestos-related disease was not likely to fall significantly for decades.

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. 003346. Barry Castleman cites it in chapter 2, "Cancer", of Asbestos: Medical and Legal Aspects (5th ed., 2005); see Reading Castleman.

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.