German Uranium Miners Studies: Evaluation of the Central Archive of the Institute of Pathology at Stollberg—First Results

Abstract The uranium miners of former East Germany form the largest cohort of 222 Rn-and dust-exposed workers in the world. Several research groups in the fields of epidemiology, employment history, dosimetry, and pathology have begun to investigate the health risk of this population. The pathology group is evaluating the central pathology archive of the Wismut company, which contains tissue samples and protocols of 28,995 autopsy cases (with 5974 lung tumors) collected from 1957 to 1989. Our first investigations revealed that more than 50 percent of the autopsy cases were underground miners. A comparison of the frequencies of malignancies (1979–1989) with those at the institute of Dresden, a nonmining district, demonstrates the high number of lung tumors in the archive of Stollberg. For that time period, the frequency of silicosis as classified by the East German pathologists is the same for persons with lung tumors as for those with other diseases. The first analysis of mining pollutants in the lungs of...