Prevalence of Occupational Asthma and Respiratory Symptoms in Foundry Workers

Table 4

The distribution of occupational asthma and mean FEV₁ (%) in foundry workers according to dust exposure.

Exposure	Department	Mean respirable dust concentration	OA (𝑛=51)	Mean FEV1 (% of predicted)^a
High-exposure groups	Fettling, cleaning castings (𝑛=64)	10.448 mg/m^3	15 (23.4%)b,∗	87.8
	Core making, furnace (𝑛=53)	10.122 mg/m^3	14 (26.4%)c,∗	89.5
Low-exposure groups	Moulding, melting, and pouring (𝑛=83)	0.322 mg/m^3	11 (13.2%)^d	94.2
	After processing (𝑛=86)	0.216 mg/m^3	8 (9.3%)^e	91.8
Unexposed group	Nonproduction (𝑛=61)	Non	3 (4.9%)	93.1

OA: occupational asthma, FEV₁: forced expiratory volume in one second; athe mean FEV₁ (% of predicted) results of the workers were not found to be different compared to unexposed group (𝑃>0.05). ^bP: 0.002, ^cP: 0.001, ^dP: 0.294, ^eP: 0.072 compared to unexposed group; *statistically significant.