Can Low-Level Radiation Cause Cancer?
“Cancer is not ’caused’ by only one thing “Health in a multi-cellular organism is maintained by homeostatic processes. Disruption of these homeostatic controls at the molecular, biochemical, cellular, and organ systems levels can be brought about by irreversible changes in the genetic material (mutagenesis), cell death (cytotoxicity), or reversible changes in the expression of genes at the transcriptional, translational, or posttranslational levels (epigenesis). While radiation is known to induce DNA damage/mutations, cell, death and epigenetic changes, in addition to cancers that are found in radiation-exposed animals, experimentally, and in humans, epidemiologically, the question is, At low-level exposure, what is the risk that cancers are ’caused’ by the radiation? “CANCER IS A MULTI-STEP, MULTI-MECHANISM PROCESS “Our understanding of experimental in vitro and in vive studies, as well as epidemiological data, suggests that carcinogenesis is the result of many endogenous and exogenou
