ABSTRACT

This chapter presents new methods to detect pneumotoxicity, describes how they can be used to detect both acute and chronic effects, and demonstrates the similarities between findings in animals and lung diseases in humans. Simple methods are needed for several scenarios, including single exposures at different concentrations, multiple exposures at different concentrations, development of cumulative pulmonary toxicity, and recovery, if any, following pulmonary injury. Indeed, a wide variety of pulmonary irritants, including phosgene and ozone, are known to induce rapid, shallow breathing in a wide variety of laboratory animals and in humans during normal air breathing. The response of a guinea pig to carbon dioxide (CO2) is even more rapid in the head chamber apparatus than in the whole-body plethysmograph. As with the results obtained in the whole-body plethysmograph, little variation between CO2 a response of different animals was found when using the head chamber.