Effective Dose - A Flawed Concept That Could and Should Be Replaced

摘要

Effective dose is used to characterize the generic risk of a total body radiation-induced stochastic health detriment. The effective dose represents flawed science: two of the most important reasons are that the tissue-specific weighting factors used to calculate effective dose are a subjective mix of different endpoints, and that the marked and differing age dependencies for different health detriment endpoints are not taken into account. Effective dose is prone to misuse, particularly in the field of radiology. It is suggested that effective dose could be replaced by a new quantity, effective risk, which, like effective dose, is a weighted sum of equivalent doses to different tissues; unlike effective dose, where the tissue-dependent weighting factors are a set of generic, subjective committee-defined numbers, the weighting factors for effective risk would simply be evaluated tissue-specific lifetime cancer risks per unit equivalent dose. The resulting "effective risk", which has the potential to be age- and gender-specific if desired, would perform the same comparative role as effective dose, be just as easy to estimate, be less prone to misuse, be more directly understandable, and would be based on solid science.