The disaster of the atomic bomb in Japan is an unforgettable event in the history of human civilization. The massive destruction and death witnessed by the world is a horrendous story of the past which every one would like to forget but that comes up again and again in different forms to remind us. The aftermath of 1945 is still haunting the population in Japan.
The recent research findings by the American Association of Cancer suggests that radiation from the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, likely rearranged chromosomes in some survivors who later developed papillary thyroid cancer as adults. This has been concluded by some Japanese researchers working on the subjects.
In the report, published in the September 1, 2008, issue of Cancer Research, the scientists report that subjects who lived close to the blast sites, comparably young men and women at the time, developed the cancer quickly once they reached adulthood. The were also likely to have a chromosomal rearrangement known as RET/PTC that is not very frequent in adults who develop the disease. "Thyroid cancer is associated with exposure to external or internal ionizing radiation. Elucidation of mechanisms of radiation-induced cancer in humans, especially early steps and pathways, has potential implications for epidemiological risk analyses, early clinical diagnosis, and chemopreventive interventions," said the study’s lead author, Kiyohiro Hamatani, Ph.D., laboratory chief, Department of Radiobiology and Molecular Epidemiology at the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) in Hiroshima.
Hamatani further adds that there are several irradiated populations worldwide that have been shown to have an increase in thyroid cancer, and that children exposed to radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident who develop papillary thyroid cancer have also been found to have RET/PTC rearrangements, although they are slightly different.
This study conducted is the part of the foundation’s long running follow-up research on 120,000 atomic bomb survivors. During 1958 to 1998, the study found about 470 thyroid cancer cases of which the estimated number of excess cases attributable to radiation is 63. About 90 percent of thyroid cancer among the survivors is of the papillary type. "That means that a younger person living close to the bombing site would be more likely to have adult onset thyroid cancer having RET/PTC rearrangements," he said.
This is the first time this has been shown. The findings also suggest that in childhood papillary thyroid cancer RET/PTC rearrangements may be much less clearly associated with radiation exposure, compared with adult-onset cancer, because RET/PTC rearrangements are frequent in childhood papillary thyroid cancer patients regardless of history of radiation exposure.
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