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Why are fewer infectious diseases detected among Chernobyl liquidators? Why did the body of the Chernobyl liquidators that still live today adapt to the high levels of ionizing radiation? And how important will these studies be for future generations? The Knowledge Radio program “The future belongs to you” was discussed with one of the researchers, Vilnius University, Faculty of Medicine, geneticist doc. Laima Ambrozaityte.
According to the scientist, overall, about seven thousand people had left Lithuania to eliminate the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. Of these, less than three thousand have survived to this day.
Currently, 115 former liquidators from the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster are involved in the investigation. They did a variety of jobs, from collecting pieces of graphite at the epicenter of the accident to conducting other jobs. The researchers would like to increase the pool of participants.
“We are looking at those who are now involved and are now alive. We are not currently looking at the part that is dead and why they are dead. As for your whole group, I could not answer that they are very healthy. However, this is one of our hypotheses that we wanted to include, they are healthy ”, said L. Ambrozaitytė.
The researchers were surprised that there were not many more cancer diseases in this group than in the general population.
“There are only isolated oncological diseases that are evaluated in this study group. This is one of the aspects that we want to analyze in the context of immunogenetics or oncogenetics, taking into account that there are few cases of oncology ”, said L. Ambrozaitytė.
Researchers had unexpected questions
The researcher pointed out that they are not very capable of identifying any specific disease that is specific to their research group.
“This allows us to analyze other protection variants in their genomes. Of the disease groups, I could mention cardiovascular diseases, (…) dental and oral pathologies, but we still do not have statistically significant differences in the genome analysis, not only epidemiological data. And we have a slightly larger group among them with ocular pathologies, ”said L. Ambrozaitytė.
According to the scientist, the theory could be suspected that these pathologies could be the effects of ionizing radiation.
“But even so, according to the numbers and the evaluation, (…) it could not be a direct reasoning between the experienced dose, albeit high, of ionizing radiation and the appearance of these diseases,” said L. Ambrozaitytė.
The study also found that Chernobyl liquidators are not infectious.
“It is very difficult to answer why this is the case, there is not much data we can trust to detail our analyzes in the context of the genome. This is a very interesting group. At present, we are detailing more immunological and resistance to various diseases (including infectious ones) both in clinical diagnoses and in areas of the genome, in order to delve into it ”, said L. Ambrozaitytė.
Science changes tack
The researcher explained that, in general, there are enough groups of genes in the human genome that are associated with certain mechanisms.
“One of them is, let’s say, a mechanism to repair DNA damage. (…) Having specific genomes, we try to find variants that are different, that are part of the protection allele or pathogen ”, said L. Ambrozaitytė.
According to the researcher, certain trends are being sought.
“We are looking at Chernobyl liquidators in Lithuania for various reasons. One of them is historical, because our department and its scientists have long delved into the structure of the Lithuanian population and the hypothetical reference genome of Lithuania to find characteristics in the genome that describe Lithuania.
On the other hand, it has to do with genome variants that simply affect hereditary and congenital diseases. Around the world, scientists are once again returning from global research involving hundreds of thousands of individuals to the study of smaller population groups. We return to the fact that specific variants can be specific only for some type of population or its group, ”said L. Ambrozaitytė.
Thus, the researcher did not rule out the possibility that the data of the liquidators of other countries could be different. In the future, the researchers would like to expand the study to include the offspring of accident liquidators.
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