Gender Difference in Smoking Effect on Chromosome Sensitivity to Gamma Radiation in a Healthy Population

Abstract Wang, L.-E., Bondy, M. L., de Andrade, M., Strom, S. S., Wang, X., Sigurdson, A., Spitz, M. R. and Wei, Q. Gender Difference and Smoking Effect in Chromosome Sensitivity to Gamma Radiation in a Healthy Population. In the general population, there is variation in radiosensitivity associated with cancer risk. However, data on the role of epigenetic factors in the variation of radiosensitivity are scarce. Thus we investigated the effects of smoking and age on the radiosensitivity of human lymphocytes by measuring the frequency of chromosome aberrations after in vitro exposure to γ rays in peripheral lymphocytes from 441 healthy subjects (18–95 years old). We analyzed the frequency of both spontaneous (baseline) and in vitro γ-ray-induced (1.5 Gy) chromatid breaks in 50 well-spread metaphases per subject. The overall mean frequencies of spontaneous and induced breaks were 0.02 and 0.45 per cell, respectively. The mean frequency of induced breaks was significantly higher in men than in women (P = 0.03...