Recent large-scale research suggests dose-risk relationship holds at small doses for leukemia:
http://www.nature.com/news/researchers-pin-down-risks-of-low...
Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Risking cancer to diminish heart disease? lol no thanks. I'd rather eat vegetables and take a walk once in a while.
Banannas are radioactive. So are carrots and potatos, and some nuts and beans.
I mean, you'd have to eat a ton of bananas for that potassium to affect your body more than the potassium you already have in your body does.
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#43One thing I did not see mentioned in the article, and which seems to never make it into most articles about the risks (or hypothetical benefits) of radiation exposure, is the massive amount of information we have about the effects of radiation from radiation oncology. Six times as many people as were exposed at Hiroshima are irradiated on purpose in the USA alone every year. And the radiation is actually measured and…
massive amount of information I'm not so sure about that. As a general rule, we don't expose healthy people to large amounts of radiation; so it's hard to separate the effects of the radiation from the effects of whatever caused them to be irradiated .
That depends. Flight crew (pilots and cabin crew) do receive significant radiation. They are a great set to study as they are generally much younger and healthier than the average medical imaging and/or oncology patient.
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that ionizing radiation isn't the cause of most genetic mutations. It is just too rare and most of it doesn't penetrate the skin anyway, the rest has to be really lucky to hit the cell in the right place at the right time. DNA copying not being perfect would be the main cause in my opinion. There is one error on average for every billion pairs copied. The human DNA has 3 billion pairs. So every time a sin…
But why are those mistakes made? Radiation?
It certainly could be, but I think most mistakes are made because of how the process is 'designed'; sometimes an incorrect molecule jiggles (literaly) into a place where it is improbable that it should.
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#45One thing I did not see mentioned in the article, and which seems to never make it into most articles about the risks (or hypothetical benefits) of radiation exposure, is the massive amount of information we have about the effects of radiation from radiation oncology. Six times as many people as were exposed at Hiroshima are irradiated on purpose in the USA alone every year. And the radiation is actually measured and…
Radiation oncology treatments usually focus a high dose on a single small area during a series of short time periods. So I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions from that about the likely effects of low-dose whole body exposure over longer periods.
You cannot focus the radiation field perfectly. The whole body will be subjected to (non uniformly distributed) dose of maybe a permille of the reference dose in the irradiation center: there is both leakage from the treatment machine and scattered radiation from within the patients body.
Given that a typical treatment will be about 50Gy (distributed over many fractions), my estimate is for a few ten mGy (mSv) in total to almost every part of the body outside of the direct beam.
(I'm building dosimeters in my day job and work on medical accelerators all the time.)
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radiation oncology treatments usually focus a high dose on a single small area during a series of short time periods. So I think it would be difficult to draw any conclusions from that about the likely effects of low-dose whole body exposure over longer periods.
Chest x-rays for example dose lots of tissue. CT scans are significantly 100-1000x higher than that and well above whole body average annual radiation exposure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT_scan
Chest X-rays are a minuscule dose. They are in a similar realm to the dose you get from a long distance flight or 2 - especially if you eat bananas while you fly.
Cardiac CT, chest/abdo/pelvis and PET scans are dose order of magnitude greater though.
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Risking cancer to diminish heart disease? lol no thanks. I'd rather eat vegetables and take a walk once in a while.
Don't walk in sunlight or you'll get exposed to low doses of radiation that "could" cause cancer. Also be cautious about where you buy those vegetables. There is a good chance they could contain things that also "could" cause cancer.
Relevant: http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
massive amount of information I'm not so sure about that. As a general rule, we don't expose healthy people to large amounts of radiation; so it's hard to separate the effects of the radiation from the effects of whatever caused them to be irradiated .
That depends. Flight crew (pilots and cabin crew) do receive significant radiation. They are a great set to study as they are generally much younger and healthier than the average medical imaging and/or oncology patient. http://aircrewhealth.com/Topics/hazards/radiation.htm
Indeed, they're a very interesting exception to the general rule about healthy people not getting significant irradiation. Pilots in particular could be a useful group to study given that they have mandatory medical checks; however, I'm not sure that the sample would be large enough to yield any statistically significant results, even if the privacy issues could be circumvented.
(Also, you run into socioeconomic confounders: Can you find another population which has both the same irregular schedules and the wage scales of pilots?)
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#49Humans evolved in sunlight receiving constant low doses of radiation. It seems logical to me that something in which is part of, the environment a species evolved to, would tend to have positive effects.
> It seems logical to me that something in which is part of, the environment a species evolved to, would tend to have positive effects. Not to me. Now, "tend not to have a negative effect on reproduction", sure. But there's no reason evolution should make it beneficial , nor even neutral to those past breeding years. For instance, if radiation caused humans to die younger than otherwise due to cancer, but still to li…
Well, the grandmother hypothesis actually suggests that among humans, living healthily into old age to help rear one's grandchildren has evolutionary benefits, even if one stops reproducing.
Re: Chernobyl Hints Radiation May Be Less Dangerous than Thought
#50Missleading titel - Alternative suggestions:
DNA Repair facilitys more effective then previously assumed. DNA filled with more trash that wont be missed. DNA-DamageDice-Game proves no existing instinct for statistics
My grandfather (he is 91 now) was heavily into radon-research, i still remember measuring those watersamples and hearing the lab-equipment count the plibs when that gas fell apart in the sensoric chamber.
He presumed it to be healthy, but the number of times you roll the DNA-Destructive Dice is still limited, before you come up with a Full House (cancer).
So gamble nature if you must (for example because some asthma makes your lungs half-unuseable), but be aware of the statistics.