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Title: Dose-response relationships for female radium dial workers: A new look

Conference ·
OSTI ID:10150264

The values of initial systemic intake and of skeletal dose for all of the U.S. radium cases have recently been revised. This revision was required following the demonstrations by Rundo and by Keane that humans who were exposed to radium as adults lost radium at a rate that depended on the quantity of radium originally deposited within their bodies. These new values have been used to define new dose-response relationships for both the bone sarcomas and the carcinomas arising in the paranasal sinuses and mastoid air cells induced by internally deposited radium. The population examined was employed in the U.S. dial painting industry prior to 1950 and consisted of 1530 female dial workers for whom radium body burden measurements were available. By the end of 1990, 46 cases of bone sarcomas and 19 cases of head carcinomas had been diagnosed in this cohort. The head carcinoma incidence can be adequately fitted by a simple linear function, as was found in previous analyses. The bone sarcoma cases were previously fitted by a dose-squared-exponential function. With the revised values of systemic intake, the sarcoma results could not be satisfactorily fitted with this expression. When the exponent on D was increased to larger values, excellent fits were obtained.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
W-31109-ENG-38
OSTI ID:
10150264
Report Number(s):
ANL/ER/CP-81061; CONF-940437-4; ON: DE94011506; TRN: 94:005464
Resource Relation:
Conference: International seminar on health effects of radium and thorium,Heidelberg (Germany),18-22 Apr 1994; Other Information: PBD: [1994]
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English