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Radiation-Induced Cancer: The Evidence and the Risk
Cancer is the main late risk of radiation. Leukemia appears first, peaking 5 to 10 years out; solid cancers take 10 years or more.
The exposed groups
Most of what we know about radiation and cancer comes from groups of people exposed to high doses. Japanese atomic-bomb survivors showed excess leukemia and solid cancers, and they remain the main source of risk estimates. Radium watch-dial painters, who shaped radium-tipped brushes with their lips, developed bone sarcoma. Uranium miners breathed radon and developed lung cancer. Early radiologists, working without protection, had more leukemia and skin cancer. Patients given Thorotrast, a thorium contrast agent used until the 1950s, developed liver cancer. Children treated with radiation to the neck or scalp, for an enlarged thymus or for ringworm, later had more thyroid cancer. Girls with scoliosis who had many spine films showed more breast cancer.