Abstract
Abstract The acute radiation exposure rate is a critical determinant for suppression of the hemagglutinin response in irradiated mice. It was found that this exposure-rate dependence of the immune response varied with: a) the total radiation dose, b) the time of radiation exposure relative to antigen injection, and c) the antigenic challenge, either as antigen dosage or species (red blood cell) of antigen. Maximum radiation-rate antibody sensitivity occurred 12 hr after antigen injection. Under these conditions, 700 R at either 40 R/min or 72 R/min suppressed the response by a factor of 68 below the same total dose at 8 R/min. This highly significant difference in the exposure-rate-dependent period together with the kinetics of killing curves for transferred spleen cells suggested that one or more populations of immunocytes may be differentially inactivated. The absence of a correlation between mortality rate and the hemagglutinin response as a function of exposure rate suggested that radiation-death itself is not a measure of immune incompetence.
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