Radiation Risk To Low Fluences of Alpha Particles May Be Greater Than We Thought

Center for Radiological Research, College of Physicians and Surgeons and Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, Columbia University August 2001

This study provides clear evidence that a single alpha particle can induce mutations and chromosome aberrations in cells that received no direct radiation exposure to their DNA. These findings imply that the target for radiation-induced genetic damage is larger than an individual cell. The observation is important in formulating risk assessment models because, for alpha particles, a cell cannot receive a dose lower than a single traversal and these hit cells are a minority population in lung tissue exposed to environmental radon.

The observation that irradiation of as few as 10% of a cell population results in a mutagenic yield similar to that when all of the cells in the population are hit indicates that low dose alpha particle irradiation can induce a huge bystander mutagenic response in neighboring cells not directly traversed by alpha particles. These results are of considerable importance in reassessing the potential genotoxic effect of low dose radiation and suggest that the assumption of direct proportionality in radiation may significantly underestimate the risk.

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