Occupational and environmental medicine
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Multicenter Study
A prospective cohort study of exposure-response relationship for vibration-induced white finger.
To investigate prospectively the relation between vibration-induced white finger (VWF) and measures of cumulative (lifetime) exposure to hand-transmitted vibration (HTV). ⋯ This prospective cohort study suggests that measures of cumulative vibration doses constructed from unweighted r.m.s. acceleration perform better for the prediction of VWF than dose measures calculated according to the recommendations of current standards. These findings should contribute to the improvement of the ISO frequency weighting for evaluating the severity of hand-transmitted vibration.
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Exposure to elevated levels of ambient air pollutants can lead to adverse cardiovascular effects. Potential mechanisms include systemic inflammation and perturbation of the coagulation balance. ⋯ Our results suggest that exposure to moderate levels of air pollution may influence serum levels of inflammatory markers.
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Comparative Study
Performance of chest radiograph and CT scan for lung cancer screening in asbestos-exposed workers.
The aim was to compare, in a cohort of asbestos-exposed workers, the sensitivity and the specificity of low-radiation helical chest CT scan with chest radiograph for the biennial screening of bronchopulmonary cancer, according to the size of detected nodules. ⋯ Although this study confirms the superior sensitivity of chest CT scan compared with conventional chest radiograph, the associated loss in specificity leads to a recommended diameter of 5 mm as the threshold for considering non-calcified lesions as "suspect", for the surveillance of asbestos-exposed individuals.
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To investigate if high physical workload is associated with low back pain (LBP) and/or neck-shoulder pain (NSP) when taking into account the influence of genetic and shared environmental factors. Further, the study aims to explore the potential influence of genetic and shared environmental factors in the associations between high physical workload and the three disorder subgroups: solely LBP, solely NSP, and concurrent LBP and NSP. ⋯ High physical workload was associated with LBP and/or NSP even after adjusting for genetic or shared environmental factors. Only for concurrent LBP and NSP, genetic and shared environmental factors seemed to have an influence on the association with high physical workload.