Do Asbestos-Induced Pleural Plaques Cause

While there is general agreement that pleural plaques are biomarkers of asbestos exposure, there is debate in the scientific community over whether pleural plaques cause lung function deficits. Many of the studies that addressed this issue were subject to certain limitations. In most studies, pleural plaques were diagnosed by ra-diography, which is less accurate than high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) and can lead to misdi-agnoses. Some studies reported lung function chang-es in subjects that had lung abnormalities in addition to pleural plaques, so that the contribution of pleural plaques to deficits was unknown. To eliminate these sources of uncertainty, we conducted the first compre-hensive analysis of the associations between pleura