Solid tumor risks after high doses of ionizing radiation

Abstract

There is increasing concern regarding radiation-related second-cancer risks in long-term radiotherapy survivors and a corresponding need to be able to predict cancer risks at high radiation doses. Although cancer risks at moderately low radiation doses are reasonably understood from atomic bomb survivor studies, there is much more uncertainty at the high doses used in radiotherapy. It has generally been assumed that cancer induction decreases rapidly at high doses due to cell killing. However, recent studies of radiation-induced second cancers in the lung and breast, covering a very wide range of doses, contradict this assumption. A likely resolution of this disagreement comes from considering cellular repopulation during and after radiation exposure. Such repopulation tends to counteract cell killing and accounts for the large discrepancies between the current standard model for cancer induction at high doses and recent second-cancer data. We describe and apply a biologically based minimally parameterized model of dose-dependent cancer risks, incorporating carcinogenic effects, cell killing, and, additionally, proliferation/repopulation effects. Including stem-cell repopulation leads to risk estimates consistent with high-dose second-cancer data. A simplified version of the model provides a practical and parameter-free approach to predicting high-dose cancer risks, based only on data for atomic bomb survivors (who were exposed to lower total doses) and the demographic variables of the population of interest. Incorporating repopulation effects provides both a mechanistic understanding of cancer risks at high doses and a practical methodology for predicting cancer risks in organs exposed to high radiation doses, such as during radiotherapy.