Tumors of the Chest Wall (1966)

This article by A. Ochsner, Jr. and A. Ochsner was a general clinical overview of tumors of the chest wall. It did not study a defined group of patients, and the text does not mention asbestos, mesothelioma or any occupational exposure. The authors described tumors of the thoracic skeleton and of the chest wall soft tissues, which may be benign, primary malignant or metastatic. They wrote that cancers spreading to the thoracic skeleton most often started in the lung, breast or prostate. The most frequent primary malignant skeletal tumors were myelomas and chondrosarcomas. The article stated that more than 60 per cent of benign and more than 85 per cent of malignant primary skeletal tumors caused symptoms when first discovered. In the authors' own experience, symptoms had lasted on average more than one year for benign tumors, a few years for primary malignant tumors, and only a few months for metastatic tumors. Among soft tissue tumors, apart from breast tumors and skin nevi, lipoma was described as the most common benign type and fibrosarcoma as the most common malignant type. The authors concluded that wide excision of primary tumors was the treatment of choice.

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.