Mesothelioma in Younger Patients

Video Transcript

"Mesothelioma in young patients is relatively rare, and the reason for that is the primary risk factor for the development of Mesothelioma is asbestos exposure, and even after one has been exposed to asbestos, there is a latency period, a lag in development of malignant mesothelioma on the order of 30 - 40 years. So even if you're exposed as a young man in your late teens, early 20s, say working in an asbestos mine years ago, you typically don't develop it until 30 or 40 years later. There is one famous case in a town in Australia that had a blue asbestos mine, where instead of grass in the schoolyards, they covered the schoolyards with asbestos dust. So the pupils there, from kindergarten on were exposed to this, and there was a cluster of relatively young individuals developing mesothelioma due to that."