POSTSCRIPT

Letters

Do all occupational respiratory sensitisers follow the united airways disease model?

M J Seed, M Carder, M Gittins, R M Agius

Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Correspondence to:
Dr M J Seed, Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group, Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK; martin.seed@manchester.ac.uk

Accepted 30 March 2009

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Castano et al¹ applied specific inhalational challenge testing to examine the important relationship between occupational rhinitis (OR) and occupational asthma (OA) in 43 subjects. Using this approach they found that OR occurred in 76.4% of confirmed cases of OA, and this provides strong evidence that the united airways disease model does apply to occupational causation overall. However, as they readily acknowledge, an attempt to stratify this relationship according to whether the causative agent is of high molecular weight (HMW) or low molecular weight (LMW) is limited by the small size of the study population. An epidemiological approach offers a means of complementing the observations from this type of clinical study in order to better characterise how the frequency of rhinitis varies with type of exposure.

National reporting schemes for occupational diseases such as The Health and Occupation Reporting (THOR) network² in the UK provide data on the causative agents . . . [Full text of this article]

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