Abstract
The ecological disasters that face Kazakhstan make environmental and health research a very large priority for the people of Kazakhstan. It is well known now that the Polygon region in east Kazakhstan was the site of nuclear weapons testing under the former Soviet Union, and 40 years of testing have scarred both the population and the environment. Childhood radiation exposure is a known risk factor for subsequent thyroid cancer and thyroid nodular diseases. In 1998, for the first time, scientists of Kazakhstan and the United States used ultrasound and fi neneedle aspiration biopsy to screen the thyroid glands of 3000 selected residents of six exposed and two nonexposed villages in the Semipalatinsk region. An international group with expertise in fallout-related dose reconstruction developed highly sophisticated algorithms for estimating individual radiation dose from external and internal sources as a function of bomb characteristics and movement of the fallout cloud, residential history, age at time of exposure, time spent outdoors, shielding provided by buildings, and dietary history obtained by questionnaire-guided interview and from archival data. This study revealed that there is an apparently strong association between fallout exposure and thyroid nodule prevalence, which is a marker for thyroid cancer risk. Different treatment modalities have been developed and implemented to improve treatment outcomes of patients with thyroid nodular diseases.
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Zhumadilov, Z.S., Orymbaeva, A.M. (2009). Fallout Exposure of the Population and Thyroid Nodular Diseases. In: Nakashima, M., Takamura, N., Tsukasaki, K., Nagayama, Y., Yamashita, S. (eds) Radiation Health Risk Sciences. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-88659-4_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-88659-4_16
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