Asbestosis and the rheumatic lung. Medical insurance assessment of combined lung diseases

: A fibrosing pulmonary disease, which could not be further classified, was diagnosed in a 76-year-old woman who for 40 years had worked as a seamstress in the textile industry. For the last 16 years she had suffered from progressively increasing shortness of breath. She died three weeks after hospitalization during which she received intensive respiratory and circulatory supportive treatment. At post-mortem examination there was evidence of minimal asbestosis, of pulmonary manifestations of rheumatoid arthritis and of recurrent pulmonary thromboembolism, as well as of the consequences of two weeks of artificial ventilation during the terminal period. This constellation of histopathological findings was assessed in relation to the part played by her occupational disease. She had been previously awarded a pension as a recognized sufferer form asbestosis (50% reduction of earning power). The histopathological findings were not such--in view of the difficult diagnostic constellation while she was alive--as to contradict with a high degree of probability the finding that she had suffered from an occupational disease.