Association between ILO profusion score and exposures among former nuclear weapons workers

Nuclear weapons industry workers are recognized as being at risk for a variety of exposures which may be associated with occupational lung disease. Limited epidemiological data is available on the prevalence of parenchymal abnormalities from radiologic screenings in this population. We reviewed 975 chest x-rays of former AEC nuclear weapons workers from a nuclear weapons assembly site as part of the Department of Energy (DoE) Former Worker Medical Screening Program established in 1996 to identify hazardous exposures in atomic weapons production, and provide medical screenings to detect health effects from those exposures. We found 93 (9.5%) workers with parenchymal abnormalities defined as ILO International Classification of Radiographs of Pneumoconioses small opacities profusion => 1/0. Of those, 21 were found to have ILO profusion score =>1/2. The risk for these abnormalities will be modeled by exposure to known fibrogenic agents in multivariate logistic regression. We will also report on the concordance in scoring parenchymal and pleural abnormalities between ILO readers.