Year: 2004
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Effort to predict the genetic consequences for humans of exposure to ionising radiation has been one of the most important issues of human genetics over the past 60 years.To date, there has been little experimental knowledge on the genetic risks of human exposure to ionising radiation.Radiation-induced deleterious hereditary effects have not been detected in human populations -not even among the offspring of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.This does not mean deleterious hereditary effects do not exist in humans, but rather that they are small and/or difficult to detect because the normal incidence of inherited abnormalities is quite high in the human population.Thus, assessment of radiation-induced hereditary risks in humans has been based on the common knowledge of human heredity and on animal experiments.However, recent data have suggested that hyper-variable tandem repeat minisatellite loci provide a useful and sensitive experimental approach for monitoring radiation-induced germline mutations in humans.In order to investigate the feasibility of the minisatellite mutation screening system in assessing radiation-induced hereditary risks in humans, we examined the amount of hereditary minisatellite mutations among the offspring of Estonian Chernobyl cleanup workers.The men studied received a median radiation dose of 109 mSv while working on the cleanup activities after the Chernobyl accident.We compared the minisatellite mutation rates of 155 children born to 147 Estonian Chernobyl cleanup workers after the accident to those of their 148 siblings born prior to it.In addition, 44 Estonian families, where the father had not been exposed to radiation, composed an additional control group.In all of these families, the paternity of the children was ascertained by using 5 minisatellite loci (APOB, HRAS, MCOB19, MCT118, and YNZ-22) in PCR-based analyses.Other 8 minisatellite loci (B6.7,CEB1, CEB15, CEB25, CEB36, MS1, MS31, and MS32) were used for minisatellite mutation screening by using Southern blot-based analyses.In these analyses, the parental origin and germline length change were determined for all detected minisatellite mutations at the eight tested loci.Out of these mutations 107 were de novo paternal minisatellite mutations (52, 42, and 13 mutants among children born after the accident, before the accident, and in additional control families, respectively)
Author: Anne Kiuru
Language: English
Subfield: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2137088669