Small Cell Carcinoma of the Lung: Epidemiology and Etiology (1981)

This book chapter was a review of the epidemiology and causes of small cell carcinoma (SCC) of the lung. It also drew on unpublished data from the author's Philadelphia Pulmonary Neoplasm Research Project, in which 17 SCC cases occurred in 52,487.9 man-years among 6,027 urban men aged 45 and over. All 17 were in men who smoked cigarettes at the start of observation. The chapter weighed smoking, ionizing radiation, asbestos, chemicals and air pollution against standard criteria for causation. On asbestos, the author called the information on lung cancer cell types meager. The chapter cited a study by Kannerstein and Churg in which SCC occurred in 11 of 50 asbestos-associated lung cancers and 14 of 50 matched controls. That study found no significant difference in cell type. The author noted that lung cancer was almost as rare in nonsmokers exposed to asbestos as in nonsmokers not exposed to asbestos. The author concluded that the data suggest the possibility that asbestos is a synergistic promoting agent rather than a primary carcinogen in the lung.

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. 003524.

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.