Validity of Silicosis Early Detection and Its Influence on Risk Estimation in Epidemiology

The sensitivity of radiographic diagnosis of silicosis in an occupational medical care (primary examination) varied between 39% and 71%, and the specifity between 60% and 99%. This means that, if the prevalence of silicosis in dust exposed population is between 2% and 8%, 23% to 56% of silicosis cases are likely to be falsely diagnosed. The dependence of misdiagnosis of silicosis on the prevalence of true silicosis in a working population is given in table 2. Although the sensitivity of silicosis diagnosis improves significantly (100%) in a radiographic re-evaluation (table 1), due to its poor specifity (12%), the quality of the silicosis diagnosis can hardly be improved by the radiographic re-evaluation (table 3). Introduction