The radioactive noble gas radon and its short-living progeny are inhaled during respiration, depositing their decay energies in the lungs. These progeny are considered responsible for more than 95% of the total effective dose and are, together with radon, classified as carcinogenic for lung cancer. Consequently, filtration of the progeny could reduce the dose to the lungs. In our study, we investigated the filtration properties of FFP2 versus surgical masks (II R) for radon and its decay products. The masks were attached to a measurement device, which enabled determination of the size distribution of radon progeny, ranging from unattached to clustered progeny. In parallel, it measured the radon activity concentration during experiments. By comparing background measurements without mask and experiments with masks, the percentage of retained unattached radon progeny was determined for FFP2 (98.8 ± 0.6%) and II R masks (98.4 ± 0.7%). For clustered progeny, the retained fraction was 85.2 ± 18.1% for FFP2 and 79.5 ± 22.1% for II R masks while radon was not filtered. We can show that masks are effective in filtering radon progeny and thus are capable of reducing the total effective dose to the lungs.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191811337 | DOI Listing |
Appl Radiat Isot
February 2025
Radiological Physics and Advisory Division, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, 400085, India; Homi Bhabha National Institute, Anushaktinagar, Mumbai, 400094, India.
Radon progeny are the major contributor to inhalation dose to humans from natural sources of radiation. In addition, they are also used as tracers to study atmospheric phenomena. This makes it important to study the behaviour of Radon Progeny in both indoor and outdoor environment.
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February 2025
State Key Laboratory of Radiation Medicine and Protection, School of Radiation Medicine and Protection, Collaborative Innovation Center of Radiological Medicine of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, China. Electronic address:
The decay of radon and its progeny mainly produces α particles and β particles. Due to their short range and high linear energy transfer (LET) of α particles, it is necessary to evaluate the dose deposition at the cellular and subcellular levels so as to better assess their health effects on the human body. Given that the lung is the primary target organ for radon exposure, we utilized human bronchial epithelial cells (BEAS-2B cells) to construct a realistic mesh model.
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February 2025
Alba Regia Technical Faculty, Óbuda University, Hungary; Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela.
Monte Carlo techniques were used to simulate the air diffusion of exhaled radon/thoron atoms from a wall, the formation and decay of different radioactive species during transport, and the response of a bare LR-115 detector placed on the exhaling surface. The spatial distributions of radionuclide decays and the detector's partial sensitivities to radon/thoron and their progeny were determined. The simulation results were numerically validated through comparisons with published theoretical and experimental data.
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January 2025
School of Nuclear Science and Technology, University of South China, Hengyang 421001, China.
In different measurement tasks, the duration allocated for radon progeny concentration measurement varies, and the requirements for measurement precision also differ. To accommodate the needs of various radon progeny concentration measurement tasks, this study takes the error in radon progeny concentration measurement as the optimization goal and the time points of the three-stage method as the optimization target, establishing an optimized three-stage method for radon progeny concentration measurement. The optimization algorithm allocates the three time periods under any total measurement time requirement, ensuring the highest measurement precision.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEJNMMI Phys
January 2025
Department for Radiation Protection and Medical Physics, Hannover Medical School, Carl-Neuberg- Str. 1, 30625, Hannover, Germany.
Background: Treatment with Ra-223 dichloride is approved for the therapy of castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) with symptomatic bone metastases and no known visceral metastases in Europe since 2013, and Ra-223 is under discussion for labelling other molecules and nanoparticles. The direct progeny of Ra-223 is Rn-219, also known as actinon, a radioactive noble gas with a half-life of 3.98 s.
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