Asbestos bodies

Our plain-English summary of Asbestos bodies, by T. Ashcroft (British Medical Journal, 1968).

The study

• Author: T. Ashcroft
• Journal: British Medical Journal
• Published: 1968;2(5606):696-7
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher · Free full text

In plain English

This was a letter to the editor, not a new study. The author replied to Dr. W. J. Smither of Cape Asbestos Company and Dr. H. C. Lewinsohn of Turner Brothers Asbestos Company, who had commented on the author's earlier survey of "asbestos bodies" found in lung smears (9 March 1968). The author agreed there was no direct evidence that the bodies contained asbestos fibres, and said the same criticism applied to all similar previous studies. The author then argued against the alternative minerals Dr. Lewinsohn had proposed. Bodies from coal or graphite dust had been excluded from the survey. None of the lung sections showed the talc dust accumulations seen in talc workers, or haemosiderosis of elastic fibres. The author judged glass fibre and aluminium silicate unlikely sources. More than half of the patients with an available occupational history had worked with asbestos or in surroundings where incidental asbestos inhalation was virtually certain. The author concluded that many bodies were probably true asbestos bodies and that occupational exposure was probably a more important source than general environmental contamination. The author called the occupational-history methods comparatively crude. The letter did not say how many patients were in the series.

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) defending the author's earlier survey of asbestos bodies in lung smears; no new data were reported
• Who was studied: Patients in the author's earlier survey (Department of Pathology, Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle upon Tyne), whose lung smears and histological lung sections were examined. Occupational histories were obtained retrospectively from relatives of deceased patients. The letter does not give the number of patients.
• Exposure: Asbestos, as the presumed source of the bodies. Alternative sources the author discussed and argued against were coal or graphite dust, talc (which may contain tremolite or anthophyllite), glass fibre, diatomaceous earth and filamentous aluminium silicate.
• Main results:
  • Bodies with a black central fibre or spicule (pseudoasbestos bodies from coal or graphite dust) had been excluded from the survey
  • None of the histological lung sections in the series showed the large accumulations of doubly refractile dust seen in the lungs of talc workers
  • None of the histological sections in the series showed haemosiderosis of elastic fibres
  • The author considered it very unlikely that any of the bodies in the series were due to glass fibres
  • The author considered aluminium silicate, used as an insulator in the country for only about three years, unlikely to be an important source of confusion in the survey
  • More than half of the patients with an available occupational history had worked with asbestos or in an environment where incidental asbestos inhalation was virtually certain
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that there was strong circumstantial evidence that many of the bodies found were true asbestos bodies. The author also concluded that occupational exposure was probably a more important source of asbestos fibres in the population than the general environmental contamination suggested by previous writers.
• Limitations the authors state:
  • The author acknowledged having no direct evidence that the bodies actually contained asbestos fibres
  • Occupational histories were obtained by comparatively crude retrospective methods from relatives of deceased patients

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.

Related studies

• Asbestos bodies in routine necropsies on Tyneside: a pathological and social study — T. Ashcroft (1968)
• Asbestos bodies or fibers and the diagnosis of asbestosis — M.L. Warnock, G. Wolery (1987)
• Asbestos bodies and mesothelioma — J. Stumphius, P.B. Meyer (1968)
• Ferruginous bodies and the histologic evaluation of dust exposure — E. Crouch, A. Churg (1984)
• Closing the knowledge gap on the composition of the asbestos bodies — F. Bardelli, C. Giacobbe, et al. (2023)
• Presence of asbestos bodies in organs other than the lung — O. Auerbach, A.S. Conston, et al. (1980)

Browse more research in British Medical Journal, or return to medical research.