It's National Asbestos Awareness Week. The U.S. Senate voted to make the first week of April Asbestos Awareness Week, urging "the Surgeon General to warn and educate people about asbestos exposure, which may be hazardous to their health." In light of it being Asbestos Awareness Week, it's fitting that researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new prognostic index to aid treating physicians in predicting outcomes of newly-diagnosed malignant pleural mesothelioma patients, and created a "job exposure matrix" to predict mesothelioma in the effort to ensure that fewer cases go undiagnosed.
Researchers in Japan recently compiled the most accurate index to predict outcomes of newly-diagnosed patients. A myriad of factors affect any mesothelioma prognosis, but scientists at Kyoto University, Hyogo College of Medicine, and Fukushima Medical University analyzed hundreds of mesothelioma patients between 2007 and 2013 to determine which factors most likely affected the patient's outcome, and to what extent. In the process, the researchers weighted each factor, and calculated the survival rate by decreasing the number of survival days based on the identified factors. Mesothelioma is a devastatingly fast-acting disease. As the researchers found, patients with none of the prognostic factors had a median survival of 1030 days. Patients with one risk factor survived on average 658 days, 373 days for two, 327 days for three, and 125 days for patients with all four. The purpose of the study was to provide treating physicians and their patients with the most information about a course of treatment.
In Australia, a country with one of the world's highest per capita rates of malignant pleural mesothelioma, information about exposure was limited. Australia's high per capita rate of mesothelioma is, in part, due to the history of asbestos mining in that region. Australia is a resource rich continent where mining is prevalent. Researchers at the University of Western Australia, in Perth, recently developed a "job exposure matrix," finding that before 1986, at least 46 different occupation/industry combinations exposed their workers to asbestos levels exceeding Australia's current exposure standards. It wasn't surprising that workers in the manufacturing, shipping, and insulation industries suffered the highest level of exposure. The researchers hoped the "job exposure matrix" will help Australian clinicians better predict asbestos-related diseases.
