Benign asbestos pleurisy

Our plain-English summary of Benign asbestos pleurisy, by H.B. Eisenstadt (JAMA, 1965).

The study

• Author: H.B. Eisenstadt
• Journal: JAMA
• Published: 1965;192:419-21
• Cited by: 26 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

Abstract

The clinical picture of benign asbestos pleurisy differs greatly from that of classical asbestosis. It may occur in the absence of significant pulmonary disease and respiratory dysfunction. This entity must be considered in the differential diagnosis of any form of idiopathic pleurisy. The history of exposure to asbestos will aid in directing the attention to this entity; however, the final diagnosis depends on a lung tissue specimen containing asbestos corpuscles or asbestos fibers.

PubMed has no abstract for this study. This is the authors' abstract, copied from the article.

In plain English

This article from a medical clinic in Port Arthur, Texas, reported four cases. The patients were men exposed to asbestos at work: an insulator, a refinery foreman, a foreman who supervised asbestos insulation, and a man whose job was not stated. No asbestos fiber type was named. Two men had pleurisy, an inflammation of the lining around the lungs, with fluid on one side and later on the other. Surgery found pleural plaques, and asbestos bodies were seen in lung tissue. One of these men became symptom-free after surgery and later recovered from a second episode. The other two men developed malignant mesothelioma, which the author described as preceded by benign pleurisy. In one, mesothelioma was found in a bone specimen a year after surgery had shown pleural thickening and plaques. The other had been hospitalized for fluid around both lungs ten years before pleural mesothelioma was diagnosed. The author reported never seeing asbestos bodies in pleural tissue. The author concluded that benign asbestos pleurisy differs greatly from classical asbestosis and may occur without significant lung disease.

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: case report of four patients (case series)
• Who was studied: Four men aged 54 to 58 with work exposure to asbestos, seen through the Medical Clinic, Port Arthur, Texas. Dated events in the cases include 1959, 1960 and 1961, and one patient had an illness ten years before 1959.
• Exposure: Occupational asbestos exposure; fiber type not stated. The jobs were an insulator with 15 years of contact, a man working with asbestos for 12 years (job not stated), a refinery foreman exposed for a decade, and a foreman who supervised asbestos insulation for three decades
• Main results:
  • Case 1 (54-year-old insulator): left-sided pleurisy in 1960, then right-sided pleurisy in March 1961. Thoracentesis yielded 500 cc of serous fluid with no malignant cells or microorganisms. Thoracotomy found thickened pleura and plaques on the parietal pleura, and a lung section showed asbestos bodies.
  • Case 2 (58-year-old man, 12 years working with asbestos): right-sided pleural effusion with asbestos bodies in the sputum. Thoracotomy revealed pleural plaques and adhesions, and a lung specimen showed asbestos bodies. He became asymptomatic after decortication and partial pleurectomy. Eight months later he had a left-sided effusion and had completely recovered one month after that.
  • Case 3 (57-year-old refinery foreman): spontaneous pneumothorax with a small pleural effusion. Thoracotomy showed pleural thickening, plaques and adhesions. A year later, malignant mesothelioma was found in a bone specimen from the chest wall.
  • Case 4 (58-year-old foreman): malignant mesothelioma of the left pleura found in 1959. He had been hospitalized ten years earlier for bilateral pleural effusions. Autopsy showed benign asbestosis in the parts of the pleura not involved by the cancer.
  • The author had never seen asbestos bodies in the pleural tissues.
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that benign asbestos pleurisy differs greatly from classical asbestosis and may occur without significant lung disease or breathing dysfunction.

Topics

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

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Pleurisy, Differential Diagnosis, Idiopathic.

Related studies

• Benign asbestos pleurisy in the rabbit. A model for the study of pathogenesis — B.L. Shore, C.C. Daughaday, et al. (1983)
• The diagnosis of desmoplastic malignant mesothelioma and its distinction from fibrous pleurisy: a histologic and immunohistochemical analysis of 31 cases including p53 immunostaining — W.E. Mangano, P.T. Cagle, et al. (1998)
• An outbreak of pleural mesothelioma and chronic fibrosing pleurisy in the village of Karain/Urgüp in Anatolia — Y.I. Baris, A.A. Sahin, et al. (1978)
• Evidence of a role for mesothelial cell-derived interleukin 8 in the pathogenesis of asbestos-induced pleurisy in rabbits — A.M. Boylan, C. Rüegg, et al. (1992)
• Respiratory function changes after asbestos pleurisy — P.H. Wright, A. Hanson, et al. (1980)
• Ventilatory failure due to asbestos pleurisy — A. Miller, A.S. Teirstein, et al. (1983)

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