Pleural mesothelioma is the most common type of malignant mesothelioma and affects the section of the mesothelium called the pleura. This is where the cancer affects the lungs and the protective lining and cavity of the lungs. The disease can grow quickly and enlarge the pleural space, causing it to fill with fluid. This fluid leads to the discomfort or pain associated with first detection of the disease. It is thought that pleural mesothelioma is caused by the inhaling of fibrous materials, including asbestos. These fibers lodge in the pleura and, over time, cause damage to the tissue layer and cancer erupts.

As a result, pleural mesothelioma is often confused with other types of diseases, such as lung cancer and viral pneumonia. Lung cancer can be caused by asbestos (asbestos lung cancer), though it differs from pleural mesothelioma in that it is a malignancy of the lung tissue itself, as opposed to pleural mesothelioma which is a malignancy of the tissue casing of the lungs. Viral pneumonia shares certain symptomatic similarities with pleural mesothelioma and is often misdiagnosed as such.

You can get all the types of Mesothelioma details on this blog.

Although reported incidence rates have increased in the past 20 years, mesothelioma is still a relatively rare cancer. The incidence rate is approximately one per 1,000,000. The highest incidence is found in Britain, Australia and Belgium: 30 per 1,000,000 per year. For comparison, populations with high levels of smoking can have a lung cancer incidence of over 1,000 per 1,000,000. Incidence of malignant mesothelioma currently ranges from about 7 to 40 per 1,000,000 in industrialized Western nations, depending on the amount of asbestos exposure of the populations during the past several decades. It has been estimated that incidence may have peaked at 15 per 1,000,000 in the United States in 2004.

Incidence is expected to continue increasing in other parts of the world. This cancer occurs about four times more frequently in men than in women and all forms of mesothelioma, except for benign mesothelioma, are invariably fatal. Approximately one fifth to one third of all mesotheliomas are peritoneal.

Between 1940 and 1979, approximately 27.5 million people were occupationally exposed to asbestos in the United States. Between 1973 and 1984, there has been a threefold increase in the diagnosis of pleural mesothelioma in Caucasian males. From 1980 to the late 1990s, the death rate from mesothelioma in the USA increased from 2,000 per year to 3,000, with men four times more likely to acquire it than women. These rates may not be accurate, since it is possible that many cases of mesothelioma are misdiagnosed as adenocarcinoma of the lung, which is difficult to differentiate from mesothelioma.