Do all occupational respiratory sensitisers follow the united airways disease model?
- Occupational and Environmental Health Research Group, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
- 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{at}manchester.ac.uk
- Accepted 30 March 2009
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 …
