Burden of injury in childhood and adolescence in 8 European countries.

Background: Injury is the major cause of death and suffering among children and adolescents, but awareness of the problem and political commitment for preventive actions remain unacceptably low. We have assessed variation in the burden of injuries in childhood and adolescence in eight European countries.

Methods: Hospital, emergency department, and mortality databases of injury patients aged 0-24 years were analyzed for Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia and the United Kingdom (England, Wales).

Can promotion of initiated cells be explained by excess replacement of radiation-inactivated neighbor cells?

Recently, the observed promotion in the clonal expansion of a two-stage cancer model was attributed to a small excess replacement probability for the initiated cells. The proposed mechanism of excess replacement was evaluated for single intermediate cells surrounded by normal cells. This paper investigates this mechanism further using the same biological parameters.

Two-mutation models for bone cancer due to radium, strontium and plutonium.

Data from beagle experiments and radium dial painters were used to derive two-mutation carcinogenesis models for bone cancer induced by the bone-seeking radionuclides radium, strontium and plutonium. For all data, the model fits indicate that at low doses both mutation rates depend linearly and equally strongly on dose rate. For the high-LET alpha-particle emitters, a cell killing term reduces the second mutation rate at high dose rates.

Radon-induced lung cancer in French and Czech miner cohorts described with a two-mutation cancer model.

A two-mutation carcinogenesis model with clonal expansion of pre-malignant cells is used to describe lung cancer mortality data from studies on French and Czech miners with relatively low exposures to radon. The aim was to derive radon-induced lung cancer risk estimates applicable to different populations using a model description consistent with both cellular dose-response relationships, and previous model analyses of animal and human epidemiological data. The significantly different baseline lung cancer risks for the two cohorts that include the effects from the unknown smoking habits, are described with different background model parameters.

The overrated role of 'promotion' in mechanistic modelling of radiation carcinogenesis.

It is argued that the 'cellular' dose-response relationships of model parameters cannot be determined from mechanistic model fits to experimental or epidemiologic cancer data. Baseline population cancer incidence data show conclusions about intermediate cell kinetics to be especially questionable. Here we recommend that mechanistic models should be applied solely in one direction: by starting from known cellular dose-response relationships the models aim at providing a biologically motivated consistent description of the development of radiation-induced cancer for different exposures, which is very important for low-dose risk estimation.

Interinstitutional variations of sensitometric curves of radiographic dosimetric films.

Depth and field size dependence of the sensitometric curves of radiographic films have been studied by various groups. Limited information is, however, available on the magnitude of the variations in sensitometric curves applied in clinical practice in different institutions. In this study we assessed in a systematic way the effect of the various parameters influencing the shape of the sensitometric curve: batch composition, irradiation conditions, film processing, and film scanning.

Population exposure to diagnostic use of ionizing radiation in The Netherlands.

The use of ionizing radiation for diagnostic medical procedures and the exposure of the Dutch population to this radiation were assessed for 1998. The annual average effective dose from diagnostic medical exposures has increased by 26% to 0.59 mSv per capita since the last inventory of medical radiation exposure in the Netherlands a decade ago.