Talc in Drugs - New England Journal of Medicine - Correspondence 1978 June

Our plain-English summary of Talc in Drugs - New England Journal of Medicine - Correspondence 1978 June (1978).

The study

• Published: New England Journal of Medicine Correspondence June (1978)
• Type of article: Letter
• Our copy: from Johns-Manville's own medical library. The article is still under copyright, so we describe it here rather than post it.

In plain English

This item was a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, published in June 1978, by writers at a School of Medicine in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was not a study and reported no measured data. The letter answered an earlier letter in the Journal by Dr Deutsch about talcum powder as a possible cause of cancer. The scanned text is badly damaged. As far as it can be read, the authors stated that asbestos is known to cause cancer and that talc usually contains asbestos fibers as a contaminant. They appear to have said that talc had not yet been conclusively shown to cause cancer. They wrote that the pharmaceutical industry continued to use talc and that products sold in Indiana and adjoining states contained talc. One company told them it had not used talc in new drugs developed in the last five years because it recognized the possible danger of talc. However, some of its drugs approved by the FDA before then did contain talc. The authors argued that federal regulations encouraged the continued use of a possibly harmful substance.

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: Letter to the editor (correspondence) responding to an earlier letter in the Journal; not a research study
• Exposure: Talc used in drugs by the pharmaceutical industry. The letter states that talc usually contains asbestos fibers as a contaminant. No fiber type is named in the legible text.
• Main results:
  • The authors asserted that asbestos is known to be carcinogenic and that talc usually contains asbestos fibers as a contaminant. This is the writers' statement, not a measurement made in this letter (text partly illegible).
  • The authors stated that the pharmaceutical industry continued to use talc, and that products sold in Indiana and adjoining states contained talc (text partly illegible).
  • The authors reported that one company told them it had not used talc in new drugs developed in the last five years because it recognized the possible danger of talc.
  • According to the letter, the same company's drugs that the FDA approved before that time did contain talc.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors argued that federal regulations discouraged removing talc from already-approved drugs, and so encouraged the continued use of a possibly harmful substance (text partly illegible).

Topics

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Talc.

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