Chest
Clinical Investigations: MiscellaneousMortality Due to Farmer's Lung in Finland
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
In Finland, the death certificates are sent from the doctor signing the document to local and provincial medico-legal officers. After checking, the causes of death are registered in the Central Statistical Office. Death certificates were coded according to a Finnish edition, 1969, of WHO International Classification of Diseases, 1967, eighth revision10 up to 1986 and thereafter according to a Finnish edition, 1987, of WHO International Classification of Diseases, 1977, ninth revision.11
Results
The clinical data of the 13 patients with FL as the underlying cause of death are presented in Table 1. All patients fulfilled the diagnostic criteria of FL presented by Terho12 and all had chest radiograph changes compatible with FL. The mean age of the patients was 52 years at the time of the diagnosis and 54 percent of them were women. Data of smoking habits were available for eight patients: all were nonsmokers. Before the diagnosis, 8 of 13 patients had suffered from symptoms of FL for
Discussion
We calculated the mortality based on data about the incidence of FL in the entire country from the years 1980 to 1982.13 These incidence data are representative, for in that nationwide study the same diagnostic criteria were used as in our study. Furthermore, the time at the beginning of 80s was close to the period when the diagnoses of FL were made in our series. We included only cases in which FL for a certainty was considered as an underlying cause of death.
We found 13 fatal cases of FL
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