The Pathogenesis of Emphysema (1965)

This book chapter by J. Gough was a narrative review of emphysema's causes. It drew on the author's autopsy observations and others' work, and did not mention asbestos. The author argued that causes could be assigned to emphysema types with a selective distribution, not to unselective "primary" emphysema. In coal workers, dust collected around the respiratory bronchioles, and after 40 years' exposure most miners showed focal dust emphysema. City dwellers showed a similar soot-associated emphysema; the author wrote that soot, or some material associated with it, seemed to cause it, and that alone it caused little or no disturbance of breathing function. The author had not seen centrilobular emphysema in children or adolescents. The youngest marked case was a 20-year-old woman who smoked cigarettes. In older age groups it became more common, especially in men, and cigarette smoking was strikingly frequent among those affected. Chronic cadmium oxide fume exposure produced emphysema sparing the outer lobules. The author concluded that outside factors, including cigarette smoking and air pollution, were important primary or contributory causes of centrilobular emphysema, and that primary emphysema's cause was unknown.

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.