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Emphysema and Chronic Airways Disease

  • Chapter
Pulmonary Pathology

Abstract

Pulmonary emphysema is among the most prevalent of all diseases. On the basis of examination of properly inflation-fixed lungs from consecutive autopsy series, it is present in at least one-third of the adult male population and in half or more of those men who smoke.1-5 This high prevalence is partly the result of the gradual evolution and progression of the lesions, which on average probably take some 30 or more years from the asymptomatic onset to the final lethal episode of respiratory failure. The prolonged course also gives many individuals the opportunity to die of other diseases so that the death rate from emphysema is far lower than the prevalence rate. Therefore, the major societal impact of the disease results not so much from total prevalence or deaths, as from the many years of disability and loss of productivity experienced by the many cases who become symptomatic in their late forties and survive with impairment throughout their fifties and sixties. The disease is less common in women, but the incidence in women has increased in recent years.5

The regression of the correlation between age at death and percentage of lung involvement by centrilobular emphysema, detemined by point-counting, in the 173 autopsies of smokers who had the disease. The slope represents progression of the disease at the rate of 7% per 10 years. The correlation coefficient is .27 and the probability that this trend might have occurred by. chance is less than .001. The equation for the regression line is: Emphysema extent = .69 × age — 13.2. Values in parentheses represent number of cases seen in each 10-year age group. Horizontal bars represent average extent of emphysema per group.

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Authors
  1. Philip C. Pratt
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pathology, The Virginia Mason Clinic, 98101, Seattle, WA, USA

    David H. Dail M.D.  & Samuel P. Hammar M.D.  & 

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© 1988 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Pratt, P.C. (1988). Emphysema and Chronic Airways Disease. In: Dail, D.H., Hammar, S.P. (eds) Pulmonary Pathology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3932-9_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3932-9_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-3934-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-3932-9

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