Chest
Volume 77, Issue 2, February 1980, Pages 133-137
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Clinical Investigations
Presence of Asbestos Bodies in Organs Other than the Lung

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This study was designed to test the hypothesis that subjects with many asbestos bodies in their lungs at autopsy would also have asbestos bodies in various other organs. The subjects included 19 cases with diagnosis of asbestosis at death (two of these had mesothelioma, five had lung cancer) and 18 with pleural plaques but not asbestosis. Occupational histories were obtained from relatives. In subjects occupationally exposed to asbestos, large numbers of asbestos bodies were found in the lungs, and in most of these, asbestos bodies were found in many of the other organs examined. In the 18 cases with only pleural plaques found at autopsy, considerably fewer asbestos bodies were found in the lungs. The number of other organs with one or more asbestos bodies ranged from 32 percent to 62 percent of the sites examined. The findings seem to confirm the hypothesis of the study.

Section snippets

Materials and Methods

Our plan was to confine the study to autopsies of persons whose lungs were likely to contain a large number of asbestos bodies. With this in mind, we reviewed the records of all autopsies performed by one of us (A.S.C.) at Somerset Medical Center, Somerville, NJ, during 1970 and selected all of the cases in which asbestosis or mesothelioma had been recorded in the final diagnosis. Since many people in the area worked in an asbestos factory (and asbestos workers often develop pleural plaques),

Lung

Two different analyses were made, one confined to definite asbestos bodies and another in which no distinction was made between definite and probable asbestos bodies. Except for absolute numbers, the two analyses yielded essentially the same results. Therefore, to save space and to be on the conservative side, we have confined this report to “definite” asbestos bodies.

Many definite asbestos bodies were found in each of the specimens of pulmonary tissue from the 19 subjects with asbestosis (TMTC

Discussion

One should not draw too-sweeping conclusions from findings in so few as 37 subjects, all of whom came to autopsy in the same hospital and many of whom had worked in an asbestos factory in which chrysotile was the principal type of asbestos used. Nevertheless, the findings strongly suggest that when people have such a degree of exposure to asbestos dust that a great many asbestos bodies are formed in the lungs, then asbestos bodies are very likely to be present in one or several other organs as

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Manuscript received March 28; revision accepted May 8

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