Asbestos bodies in peritoneum

Our plain-English summary of Asbestos bodies in peritoneum, by H. Levine (The New England Journal of Medicine, 1968).

The study

• Author: H. Levine
• Journal: The New England Journal of Medicine
• Published: 1968;278(11):630
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher
• In J-M's library: Johns-Manville's company medical library held a copy.

In plain English

This item is not a research study but an exchange of two letters to the editor. Harold Levine, of the Department of Thoracic Medicine at Cook County Hospital, Chicago, responded to the Massachusetts General Hospital case record of January 11, in which Dr. Castleman had answered "No" when asked whether asbestos bodies are present in the peritoneal cavity in cases of primary peritoneal mesothelioma. Levine cited a case published earlier with M. E. Rubnitz in which asbestos bodies were found in the peritoneal cavity in association with a peritoneal mesothelioma, and said it contradicted that answer. Levine added that Rubnitz's staff at the Hines Veterans Administration Hospital were running experiments on how asbestos fibers reach the peritoneal cavity. In reply, Castleman, a pathologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, wrote that no asbestos bodies had been seen in the peritoneum in that hospital's peritoneal mesothelial tumor cases, but that finding some was not unexpected. Castleman cited other researchers' reports and concluded that identifying asbestos bodies in the peritoneum is rare compared with 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.

What the study did and found

• Design: Correspondence: a letter to the editor and the reply to it. Levine's letter refers to a single previously published case.
• Who was studied: No new study population. Levine referred to one previously published case of peritoneal mesothelioma. Castleman referred to the peritoneal mesothelial tumor cases seen at Massachusetts General Hospital, with no number given.
• Exposure: Asbestos bodies and asbestos fibers found in the peritoneum and lung. No fiber type, product or occupation is named.
• Main results:
  • Levine: in the case published with M. E. Rubnitz, asbestos bodies were found in the peritoneal cavity in association with a peritoneal mesothelioma.
  • Levine: Dr. Rubnitz and staff at the Hines Veterans Administration Hospital were conducting experiments to find out how asbestos fibers get into the peritoneal cavity. The findings had not yet been published.
  • Castleman: in the cases of peritoneal mesothelial tumors seen at Massachusetts General Hospital, no asbestos bodies were observed in the peritoneum.
  • Castleman: that some asbestos bodies might be found in the peritoneum, as shown in Figure 4 of Levine and Rubnitz's paper, was not unexpected.
  • Castleman cited other researchers' work, not data from this letter. One earlier report described 11 cases of peritoneal mesothelioma with suspected fibrous material that could not be proved to be asbestos fibers. A more recent report found asbestos fibers in seven of 21 peritoneal mesotheliomas, but only when the tissues were incinerated.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors disagreed. Levine stated that the published case contradicted Castleman's answer. Castleman concluded that, compared with how easily and often asbestos bodies are identified in the lung tissue of patients with mesothelial tumors, finding them in the peritoneum is rare.

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Asbestosis.

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Asbestos Bodies, Peritoneum.

Related studies

• Asbestos bodies in peritoneum — B. Castleman (1968)
• Mesothelioma of the pelvic peritoneum resembling papillary cystadenocarcinoma of the ovary; case report — M. Swerdlow (1959)
• Diffuse mesothelioma of the peritoneum: correlation between histological and clinical parameters and survival in 73 patients — S. Liu, P. Staats, et al. (2014)
• Diffuse mesothelioma of the peritoneum: a pathological study of 64 tumours treated with cytoreductive therapy — M. Lee, H.R. Alexander, et al. (2013)
• Aberrant Pax-8 expression in well-differentiated papillary mesothelioma and malignant mesothelioma of the peritoneum: a clinicopathologic study — D. Xing, N. Banet, et al. (2018)
• Peritoneal malignant mesothelioma (PMM), and primary peritoneal serous carcinoma (PPSC) and reactive mesothelial hyperplasia (RMH) of the peritoneum. Immunohistochemical and fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) analyses — T. Kawai, S. Tominaga, et al. (2016)

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