NEW YORK — Most of the New York City firefighters and medics whose lungs were damaged by pulverized masonry and glass from the World Trade Center attacks are not improving, according to a new study.
The results are based on breathing tests from nearly 11,000 firefighters who were at ground zero in the first two weeks, when the dust cloud was thickest. Of the firefighters who did not smoke, 13 percent were still scoring below normal up to seven years later, the study found.
That number was down from 18 percent who initially tested below normal after the attacks, according to researchers at the New York City Fire Department and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Among emergency medical technicians, the numbers were worse. Of the nearly 2,000 EMTs included in the analysis, 22 percent of the nonsmokers scored below normal on their most recent breathing test.
The research is in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
The study dims hopes that the breathing of workers who developed respiratory problems would gradually return to normal.
Firefighters commonly suffer some lung damage after being exposed to heavy smoke, but the problem is not usually long-term. Previous studies of firefighters who lost breathing capacity after battling chemical and forest fires found that they generally recovered within days or weeks.
That has not happened with 9/11 responders, said Dr. David Prezant, the Fire Department’s chief medical officer and a lead author of the study. He and other researchers noted that the particle cloud released by the trade center collapse was unique.
In the immediate aftermath, they were exposed to “unprecedented density of dust, smoke, all kinds of materials that they don’t encounter in a routine course of firefighting,’’ said Dr. Thomas Aldrich, professor of medicine at Albert Einstein.
Overall, firefighters in the study experienced, in one event, the normal loss of lung function caused by aging 12 years, Prezant said.
The research was based on tests that measure how fast a person can exhale.
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