Associations of black carbon with lung function and airway inflammation in schoolchildren
Background: Few studies have investigated the 24-hour respiratory health effects of personal black carbon (BC) and ultrafine particles (UFP) exposure in schoolchildren. The objective of this study was to investigate these associations with the lung function in children 10-years old with and without persistent respiratory symptoms. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study in 305 children (147 and 158 with and without persistent respiratory symptoms, respectively) from three European birth-cohorts: PARIS (France) and INMA Sabadell and Valencia (Spain). Personal 24-hour measurements of exposure concentrations to BC and UFP were performed by portable devices, before lung function testing. …
Pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis as a late complication of chemotherapy agents
To the Editor: We identified six patients with clinical, radiographic and physiological features typical of pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis (PPFE). In the six cases, PPFE may have been causally related to prior alkylating drugs used to treat malignacy, namely cyclophosphamide in five of the cases and carmustine (BCNU (1,3-bis-(2-chloroethyl)-1-nitrosourea)) in one. Based on an extensive review of the literature, we suspect that similar cases may have already been reported in the past 4 decades but have not been recognised either as PPFE or as drug-induced in nature. In 2004, Frankel et al. [1] described a then-new clinicopathologic entity, which they termed “idiopathic PPFE”. The authors i…