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According to Wikipedia, Acute Radiation Syndrom (ARS) results from damage to

  1. DNA
  2. "other key molecular structures within the cells"

I'd like to know how relevant damage of the second kind is. Given that DNA damage in turn leads to cancer, the correlation between ARS and development of cancer might give at least a hint as to how important that second factor is.

So: How likely is a person to develop cancer, given he has already had ARS in the past?

Pills N Pillows
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wnrph
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1 Answers1

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From your link:

According to the linear no-threshold model, any exposure to ionizing radiation, even at doses too low to produce any symptoms of radiation sickness, can induce cancer due to cellular and genetic damage. Under this assumption survivors of acute radiation syndrome face an increased risk developing cancer later in life. The probability of developing cancer is a linear function with respect to the effective radiation dose

Again, according to the linear no-threshold model, which is used for US and much international legislation.

It is not possible to accurately know effective doses from only the ARS symptoms. The rough values are also mentioned in your link.

jiggunjer
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  • This is not what am asking for. I'm asking for the conditional probability. Of course the cancer risk depends on dosage. But how does the information that a person had ARS change the probability for him to get cancer? – wnrph Mar 23 '16 at 09:22
  • Like I said, you can not accurately estimate the dose given only the symptoms. But using the rough values you can know the dose in Sievert. Then it is simple to calculate the probability of getting cancer, as the unit Sievert directly correlates with this chance. – jiggunjer Mar 23 '16 at 11:53
  • But that is not the conditional probability. You are talking about P(A) while i'm talking about P(A|B) – wnrph Mar 23 '16 at 14:02
  • Which in this case is the same. You're asking what the chance is, given a person had ARS. That is exactly the same as asking what the chance is, given an exposure to a dose of X Sievert. The fact that a person also had acute symptoms should not affect the long term effect. – jiggunjer Mar 24 '16 at 01:42
  • Now I see your point. But does the dose really fully determine whether someone gets ARS without any randomness involved? I mean there has to be some gray area where some people don't get sick while others would not even if they were exposed to the same radiation dose. – wnrph Mar 24 '16 at 10:06
  • ARS depends on the dose and the exposure period. The acute effects are not really stochastic, but I suppose it may vary a bit based on radiation type and person's metabolism. Like with sunlight, you don't get burned with small exposures over the course of a year. But if you took all that light from over a whole year and exposed yourself to it over the course of a day, you would be very burned. – jiggunjer Mar 25 '16 at 07:33
  • Note that two people exposed to the same gamma blast may absorb different doses. In that sense the acute effects are stochastic. But given the same absorbed whole body dose the effects (like amount of nerve damage, etc.) will be similar--deterministic. This is because our tissue properties don't vary that much. – jiggunjer Mar 25 '16 at 07:49
  • That really goes against my intuition. I would suppose that each person has a different capacity to handle tissue or DNA damage, so even if the initial radiation damage was the same, the physiological mid-term impact (e.g. showing signs of ARS) would not be deterministic. – wnrph Mar 25 '16 at 10:20
  • Well of course an old lady has less tolerance than a healthy young man. But that is true for most pathologies. I was referring to the cellular damage done, i.e. the acute physioglogical effects, which is only loosely correlated with symptoms (which you are referring to). E.g. if you punch two people with similar builds, the effects on the second will be predictable based on what we saw with the first. In that sense it is deterministic. Just like people with the flu will get a runny nose. Nothing random to it, but older people may handle it worse. – jiggunjer Mar 25 '16 at 14:49