TO THE EDITOR: Allow me to refer to the article by Jeffry A. Siegel, Charles W. Pennington, and Bill Sacks entitled “Subjecting Radiologic Imaging to the Linear No-Threshold Hypothesis: A Non Sequitur of Non-Trivial Proportion,” which was published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine this January (1). I would like to congratulate your journal for its courage to present a platform for engagement in the controversy regarding low-dose–associated health risks and benefits from radiologic imaging. The medical community at large, not only the nuclear medical physicians and radiologists, should be delighted to read this superb review and conclusion. The widespread fear of low-dose radiation has brought on serious negative impacts on public health and socioeconomic development. The fear creates huge expenditures to avoid radiation exposure even at low doses at which detrimental health effects are not observed. The article by Siegel at al. should serve for teaching students. One should hope that the current discourse with the wealth of new data will lead to further research to fully unravel the mechanisms that underlie the facts of low-dose–induced protection against damage, be it radiogenic or nonradiogenic. A ratio of 1 between the amounts of radiation-induced damage and of radiation-induced damage prevention in the exposed system signals zero system response; a hormetic system response is the result of this ratio being below 1. National and international protection advisers and officers hesitate to accept the new biologic data but will eventually follow the best of science.
Footnotes
Published online Jan. 26, 2017.
- © 2017 by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.
REFERENCE
- 1.