[Asbestos-induced malignant tumors].

Asbestos had been increasingly used in many applications across numerous industries on account of its particular material properties, including resistance to heat and fire as well as to aggressive chemicals, high mechanical strength, insulation capacity, other physical parameters, and for its low price. World wide asbestos production and processing thus went up from 50 tons to 5.5 million tons per annum, in about 100 years. Widespread application of asbestos as well as of asbestos-containing materials and workpieces together with the understanding that asbestos for its fibrogenicity is capable of causing pulmonary and pleural asbestoses constitute a major challenge for thorough elucidation of related occupational diseases and their relationship with asbestos. This demand is additionally supported in urgency by the cancerogenicity of asbestos potentially leading to malignant diffuse mesotheliomas, bronchial carcinomas, and, obviously, other tumors. In the context of malignant mesotheliomas, emphasis has to be laid on characteristic morphological features, biological behaviours, and asbestos-related aetiology. As bronchial carcinomas have several aetiological backgrounds, answers will have to be found to the questions for which of them may have been fully or partially caused by asbestos and which have not. No differentiation has so far been feasible, in this context, by tumour morphology, including histological typing. After all, when it comes to malignant tumours of other organs, additional epidemiological as well as pathologico-anatomic efforts will have to be made to find out, if and where a given case of tumour growth has coincided with exposure to asbestos.