Lung Damage To WTC Workers = 12 Years' Worth Of Aging - USA Today

Working amid the rubble of the World Trade Center may have aged the lungs of firefighters and rescue workers by an average of 12 years, a new study shows.

"It's pretty shocking," says John Balmes, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who reviewed the research, published today in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, but was not involved in writing it. "They got 12 years' worth of loss in one year."

Doctors have closely monitored the health of workers exposed to dust from the towers' collapse. In the study, doctors report the results of periodic lung function tests that were given to about 12,000 New York City Fire Department rescue workers from 1997 to 2002, says Gisela Banauch, an author of the paper. Doctors gauged lung capacity by measuring how much patients could breathe out in one second, she says. This measure, called forced expiratory volume, or FEV, tends to decline with age.

Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, workers' scores dropped by about 31 milliliters of lung volume a year, according to the study. In the year after the attacks, however, rescuers lost an average of 372 milliliters — a decline doctors would expect to see after 12 years of aging, says Banauch, an attending physician at New York's Montefiore Medical Center. The authors say they don't know whether lung function will continue to deteriorate or whether rescuers' lungs will heal some of the damage.

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