Background Level of Unstable Chromosome Aberrations in the Kazakhstan Population: A Human Biomonitoring Study

Abstract

Kazakhstan is known as a country with a complex radioecological situation resulting from different sources such as a natural radiation background, extensive activities of the industrial system of the former Soviet Union and a well-known testing of nuclear power weapons occurred in the Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS) area. The present study focuses on the assessment of the background of dicentric chromosomes in Kazakhstan’s population, which is the starting point in the dose assessment of irradiated people, since the baseline level of spontaneous dicentrics can vary significantly in different populations. In this context, aiming to determine the background frequency of chromosome aberrations in the population of Kazakhstan, considering the heterogeneity of natural radiation background levels of its large territory, a selection of 40 control subjects living in four cities of North, South, West and East Kazakhstan was performed. The cytogenetic study on the selected groups showed fairly low background frequency values of chromosome aberrations (0.84 ± 0.83 per 1000 cells), comparable with other data in the literature on general populations, reporting background frequency values between 0.54 and 2.99 per 1000 cells. The obtained results should be taken into account when constructing the dose–effect calibration curve used in cytogenetic biodosimetry, as a “zero” dose point, which will reduce the uncertainty in quantifying the individual absorbed dose in emergency radiological situations.

Effects of low-dose ionizing radiation on genomic instability in interventional radiology workers

“…In our control samples, the frequency of MN did not differ from the data of healthy population as previously reported 25 . Frequency of dicentrics + rings in our control sample is in line with results from Carbonell et al 26 , but slightly higher in comparison to majority of publications 27 , 28 . The main reason for this difference could be that our control samples came from various hospital departments where medical staff might be exposed to different carcinogenic and/or genotoxic agents such as formaldehyde, organic solvents, anesthetic gases, and anticancer drugs.…”