More on thoracic neoplasms related to Lucite sphere plombage

Our plain-English summary of More on thoracic neoplasms related to Lucite sphere plombage, by C. Ibarra-Perez, J. Kelly-Garcia (Chest, 1995).

The study

• Authors: C. Ibarra-Perez, J. Kelly-Garcia
• Journal: Chest
• Published: 1995;107(2):581-2
• Type of article: Letter
• Cited by: 2 articles, as counted by NIH iCite
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is a short letter to the editor of Chest, not a research study. The authors, from a thoracic surgery department in Mexico City, followed up an earlier article by Harland and colleagues and their own earlier letter. They wrote that Dr. Victor L. Roggli had pointed them to a paper by Roggli and coworkers. That paper described a 44-year-old man treated for pulmonary tuberculosis by thoracic plombage with methylmethacrylate (Lucite) spheres. Twenty years later he was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma of the pleural cavity on the same side. He had very low levels of asbestos bodies in the lung. Roggli and coworkers used his case to put forward the hypothesis that factors other than asbestos could be involved in causing mesothelioma. The authors added this case to their list of chest cancers related to Lucite sphere plombage. The list held three patients, two women and one man, aged 42, 44 and 60, with cancers of the lung, chest wall and pleura, whose plombage had been done 18, 20 and 42 years earlier. They suggested reviewing the original tumor slides of all three patients.

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) reporting a published case from another group's paper; no new patients or data
• Who was studied: One previously published patient (from a paper by Roggli and coworkers): a 44-year-old man treated for pulmonary tuberculosis by thoracic plombage, added to a list of three patients (two women, one man) collected from three groups of authors
• Exposure: Thoracic plombage with methylmethacrylate (Lucite) spheres for pulmonary tuberculosis. The patient described had very low levels of asbestos bodies in the lung. No asbestos fiber type is named.
• Main results:
  • In the case reported by Roggli and coworkers, the man was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma of the pleural cavity on the same side as the plombage, 20 years after the procedure
  • That patient had very low levels of asbestos bodies in the lung
  • Roggli and coworkers (not the letter's authors) used the case to advance the hypothesis that factors other than asbestos could be involved in the development of mesothelioma
  • The authors' list of thoracic malignancies related to Lucite sphere plombage held three patients, two women and one man. They were aged 42, 44 and 60 at presentation, had malignancies of the lung, chest wall and pleura, and had undergone plombage 18, 20 and 42 years before.
• The authors' conclusion: The authors regarded the case as an addition to their growing list of thoracic malignancies related to methylmethacrylate sphere plombage. They suggested retrieving the old slides of the three patients to review the tumor histology.

Topics

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

Related studies

• ¹⁸F-FDG uptake on PET is a predictive marker of thymidylate synthase expression in patients with thoracic neoplasms — K. Kaira, N. Yamamoto, et al. (2014)
• Asbestos exposures and thoracic neoplasms — R.N. Jones (1992)
• ¹⁸F-FDG uptake on PET could be a predictive marker of excision repair cross-complementation group 1 (ERCC1) expression in patients with thoracic neoplasms? — K. Kaira, M. Endo, et al. (2012)
• Asbestosis and primary intrathoracic neoplasms — W.D. Buchanan (1965)
• Brachytherapy for non-small cell lung cancer and selected neoplasms of the chest — A. Raben, B. Mychalczak (1997)
• The modern use of thoracoplasty — R.A. Hopkins, R.M. Ungerleider, et al. (1985)

Browse more research in Chest, or return to medical research.