Reply to the editor

Our plain-English summary of Reply to the editor, by W.T. Vigneswaran (The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, 2014).

The study

• Author: W.T. Vigneswaran
• Journal: The Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
• Published: 2014;148(4):1763-4
• Type of article: Letter, Comment
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is a letter to the editor, not a research study, and it reports no new data. It replied to a letter from a Sydney radiologist. That letter had noted that people treated with pleurodesis as young adults for spontaneous pneumothorax have reportedly never developed malignant pleural mesothelioma. It proposed considering pleurodesis, a procedure that seals the lung lining to the chest wall, to prevent pleural mesothelioma in people with simple asbestos-related pleural change. In reply, the author wrote of being unaware of any link between pleurodesis and prevention of this disease. The author noted that talc preparations once contained asbestos and were thought to cause mesothelioma, but that medical talc has been asbestos free for decades. The author also cited laboratory work by others suggesting talc may have antitumor effects, such as inducing apoptosis (cell death) in human mesothelioma cells. The author called the prevention idea interesting but concluded that more preclinical data are required to support its practice.

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 (reply to a letter); no original data
• Who was studied: No patients or subjects were studied
• Exposure: Mechanical and chemical (talc) pleurodesis, discussed as a possible way to prevent pleural mesothelioma in individuals with simple asbestos-related pleural change
• Main results:
  • The author stated being unaware of any link between pleurodesis and prevention of mesothelioma
  • The author noted that good long-term survival after talc pleurodesis has been reported in some patients with pleural effusion associated with mesothelioma (a finding from other published work, not this letter)
  • The author stated that talc preparations once contained asbestos and were thought to cause mesothelioma
  • The author stated that medical talc preparations have been asbestos free for decades
  • The author cited laboratory studies by others showing that talc induced apoptosis in human mesothelioma cells
• The authors' conclusion: The author called using pleurodesis to prevent pleural mesothelioma in people with simple asbestos-related pleural change an interesting idea, but concluded that more preclinical data are required to support its practice

Topics

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

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