Many of you may have gotten a small taste of what happens to people when exposed to
radiation from HBO’s dramatic new show, Chernobyl.
It’s gruesome and painful to say the least, and often life-threatening. And while watching,
I couldn’t help but wonder: if Chernobyl had happened today, over 30 years later,
how would we treat people suffering from radiation poisoning?
What people experience when exposed to high doses of radiation is called Acute Radiation
Syndrome, also known as radiation sickness or radiation poisoning.
In other videos, we’ve covered in more detail what happens to your body when you get radiation
sickness, but in brief, it goes like this.
The kind of radiation that we’re talking about is called ionizing radiation, meaning
the particles doing the damage have enough energy that when they react with other atoms,
they can remove electrons from that atom, causing it to become charged or ionized.
As you can imagine, this is quite a problem when those atoms are in your body.
Changing the fundamental nature of an atom in your biological tissue, like making it
charged when it wasn’t before, can seriously mess up parts of your cells so they don’t
function properly, including your DNA.
These newly created ions can also interact with other molecules that naturally exist in
your body to create toxic substances, like hydrogen peroxide, which can also destroy cells.
Cells that replicate faster than others in your body are much more susceptible to radiation
because as they divide more, their DNA is more exposed.
So tissues that regenerate more often, like your bone marrow and your gastrointestinal tract
and your skin, are where you see the most acute effects of radiation poisoning, with
symptoms like nausea, vomiting, skin falling off, etc.
So how do we treat it?
Once you’ve been exposed to a high radiation dose, what can we do?
We start pretty primitively, but those exposed to poisonous doses of radiation, even low
ones, should immediately remove clothes and outerwear that have been exposed to and have
absorbed the radiation, to eliminate contact with that now radioactive material.
Those exposed also need to wash radioactive material off their bodies and out of any wounds,
and this can be done using something called a chelating agent, or a substance that binds
to radioactive compounds so that when you rinse,
they’re picked up off your skin and removed.
Another relatively simple remedy that’s been around for a long time is called Prussian
Blue, an iron cyanide pigment compound that when ingested, binds to radioactive
isotopes and keeps them from being absorbed by your body.
Then it just exits your body as waste.
Potassium Iodide is also a more classic treatment.
It’s a stable salt, and again, binds to radioactive compounds, particularly radioactive
iodine, to keep it from damaging your thyroid—which is incredibly important because your thyroid
is an essential gland that regulates some of your most important bodily processes, like
your metabolic system.
And thyroid damage and cancer were some of the many conditions experienced by those exposed to Chernobyl’s
radiation.
And the other treatments for radiation poisoning that we had back in Chernobyl’s day were
palliative: treating the symptoms and supporting vital functions as your body either recovered
or didn’t.
For example, impaired bone function due to radiation means less blood cells and decreased
immunity, so treatment for that includes blood transfusions and antibiotics to fight off
any potential infection.
But a significant update to this treatment are white blood cell stimulating medications to
make your bone marrow produce more of the cells it's supposed to.
And luckily, we’ve made several developments like this since the Chernobyl days to make
radiation poisoning treatment more effective.
For example, a team in China recently created a new actinide decorporation agent.
That means taking a harmful radioactive compound—an actinide—that’s been deposited in your
bones and organs and removing it.
Decorporation agents like this have actually been around since the 50’s, and potassium
iodide and Prussian blue are technically decorporation agents as well, but many teams around the
world are working on making new ones.
We want them to be more effective, work faster, and be safer to use and this most recent
development has a record high removal rate of uranium isotopes in organs and bones, while
having low toxicity itself.
This promising new technique is just in animal trials right now, but is representative of
a whole community that’s working on new ways to remove radiation from the human body.
The entire family of decorporation agents, old and new, is joined by other new kinds
of drugs, many repurposed from other medical applications—like increasing blood flow and
reducing inflammation for other conditions—and their properties work to protect tissues from
further damage, while decorporation agents can whisk the damaging compounds away.
TP508, for example, was developed for the treatment of severe diabetes symptoms, but
it's shown to be effective in preventing the destruction of intestinal cells in those with
radiation poisoning, while also increasing the rate of cell repair. At the very least, this
buys doctors more time as they treat those exposed to extreme radiation.
And even though we’ve been talking about short-term treatments for acute radiation
poisoning, modern medicine, especially advances in genetics and more personalized treatments,
will hopefully also make a huge difference in the treatment—and perhaps—prevention of the
more long-term effects of radiation exposure, like radiation-induced cancers.
Research like this is incredibly important not only for victims of nuclear disasters,
but also for people every day dealing with side effects of radiation treatments for various
illnesses.
If Chernobyl were to happen today, we would have some new treatments to try, but hopefully
medicine will continue to make strides like this to make complete cure of radiation sickness
a reality.
Do you want to know how radiation exposure affects your body, then take a look at this video here.
And if you want to know more about a particular treatment, let us know down in the comments below.
Make sure to subscribe to Seeker and thanks so much for watching.
We'll see you next time.