Letter to Editor Re: Fang et al entitled Assessment of Genomic Instabilityin Medical Workers Exposed to Chronic Low-Dose X-Rays in Northern China

摘要

With great concern, we read an article by Fang et al entitled “Assessment of GenomicInstability in Medical Workers Exposed to Chronic Low-Dose X-Rays in NorthernChina” recently published in the journal Dose-Response.1 This is an important issue associated with radiation protection since the accurateassessment of health risks from such low-dose radiation remains challenging and controversial.However, the presentation and conclusion of this work are ambiguous. We focus our comments onthe foremost limitation of the article by Fang et al1 (ie, the analyses of cytogenetic data) that weakens their conclusion of a strongcorrelation between genomic instability and the duration of exposure to low-dose radiation.The use of working years to categorize the subjects is inappropriate and should not be usedsince there were large variations in exposure levels in each group of workers. A more accuratemetric to relate biological damage to exposure is the level of radiation dose.