Acute radiation syndrome

Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS): A Fact Sheet for the Public

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Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS), or radiation sickness, is a serious illness that can happen when a person is exposed to very high levels of radiation, usually over a short period of time. The amount of radiation that a person’s body absorbs is called the radiation dose.

People exposed to radiation will get ARS only if:

  • The radiation dose was high
  • The radiation was able to reach internal organs (penetrating)
  • The person’s entire body, or most of it, received the dose
  • The radiation was received in a short time, usually within minutes

Symptoms of ARS

  • Symptoms of ARS may include nausea, vomiting, headache, and diarrhea.
    • These symptoms start within minutes to days after the exposure, can last for minutes up to several days, and may come and go.
    • If you have these symptoms after a radiation emergency, seek medical attention as soon as emergency officials determine it is safe to do so.
  • After the initial symptoms, a person usually looks and feels healthy for a period of time, after which he or she will become sick again with variable symptoms and severity that vary depending on the radiation dose that he or she received.
    • These symptoms include loss of appetite, fatigue, fever, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and possibly even seizures and coma.
    • This seriously ill stage may last from a few hours up to several months.
    • People who receive a high radiation dose also can have skin damage. This damage can start to show within a few hours after exposure or it may be delayed for several days. It can include swelling, itching, and redness of the skin (like a bad sunburn) or may be more severe and include blisters or ulcers.
      • The skin may heal for a short time, followed by the return of swelling, itching, and redness days or weeks later.
      • Complete healing of the skin may take from several weeks up to a few years.
      • The time for skin to heal depends on the radiation dose the person’s skin received.
      • People who receive a high radiation dose to all or part of the body also may experience temporary hair loss. It may take several weeks for the hair to grow back.

Treatment of ARS

  • Treatment of ARS focuses on reducing and treating infections, maintaining hydration, and treating injuries and burns. Some patients may benefit from treatments that help the bone marrow recover its function.
  • The lower the radiation dose, the more likely it is that the person will recover from ARS.
  • The cause of death in most cases is the destruction of the person’s bone marrow, which results in infections and internal bleeding.
  • For survivors of ARS, the recovery process may last from several weeks up to 2 years.
  • Cutaneous Radiation Injury (CRI) happens when exposure to a large dose of radiation causes injury to the skin. A doctor will suspect the presence of a CRI when a skin burn develops in a person who was not exposed to a source of heat, electrical current, or chemicals.
Radiation Alert Symbol

People with ARS typically also have some skin damage. This damage can start to show within a few hours after exposure and can include swelling, itching, and redness of the skin (like a bad sunburn).There also can be hair loss. As with the other symptoms, the skin may heal for a short time, followed by the return of swelling, itching, and redness days or weeks later. Complete healing of the skin may take from several weeks up to a few years depending on the radiation dose the person’s skin received.

Household Spice Protects Against Radiation Treatment’s Horrible

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The humble spice turmeric, in doses available for pennies a day, has been found to reduce one of the most devastating side effects of radiation treatment for head and neck cancer.

Each year, 60,000 patients are diagnosed with ‘head and neck cancer,’ which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue, pharynx, larynx, oral cavity, and thyroid.[i] Sadly, within the conventional medical model, radiation therapy is the ‘standard of care’ for this type of cancer, which involves the use of up to 50-70 Grays of radiation over a 5-7 week period.  To put this dose into perspective, a whole-body exposure to 8 Grays of high-energy radiation in a single dose has a 100% mortality rate within two weeks.[ii] This is a major (if not the primary) reason why radiation oncologists use ‘fractionation,’ breaking the total dose up into smaller fractions over time (1.8-2 Grays per day), in order to prevent the rapid death of the patient from acute radiation poisoning.

The primary adverse symptoms experienced by post-radiation treatment survivors is known as ‘oral mucositis,’ involving tissue destruction and functional problems in the oral cavity, which is painful, affects nutrition, contributes to local and systemic infections and greatly reduces the quality of life.[iii]  There are other lesser known and potentially more lethal problems associated with radiotherapy, not the least of which is its ability to transform non-tumorigenic cancer cells into tumor-initiating ones (exhibiting cancer stem cell-like properties), but the medical establishment rarely if ever touches upon these downstream effects, many of which can not easily be linked to the treatment, or are conveniently written off as being caused by the recurrence of “treatment-resistant” cancer and not the inherent carcinogenicity of radiotherapy itself.

While in many ways the treatment of head and neck cancer through solely conventional means is tragic today, the medical establishment is beginning to wake up to the utility of natural compounds in at least reducing or preventing unnecessary harm caused by the use of chemotherapy and radiation. There is no denying that a massive body of research has now accumulated showing that spices as common as turmeric are capable of both increasing the effectiveness of conventional treatment while at the same time reducing the collateral damage to the patient caused by them. [Read: Integrative Cancer Research: Surviving Chemo & Radiation for more information]. From the perspective of a patient faced with the inevitable side effects of radiotherapy, it is clearly unethical for practicing physicians to ignore, or worse, deny the evidence that better outcomes are available using an integrative approach.

All the more reason why a new study published in the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies, should move the oncology community closer in this direction. Titled,”The Indian Spice Turmeric Delays and Mitigates Radiation-Induced Oral Mucositis in Patients Undergoing Treatment for Head and Neck Cancer: An Investigational Study,”[iv] researchers evaluated the efficacy of turmeric in preventing radiation-induced mucositis.

In the single-blinded, randomized, controlled clinical trial conducted with head and neck cancer patients requiring 70 Gray of radiation or chemoradiotherapy (daily radiotherapy plus carboplatin once a week), 80 eligible patients were randomly assigned to receive either turmeric gargle (40) or povidone-iodine (40) during chemo/radiotherapy during the period of treatment.

Oral mucositis was assessed before the start, during, and at the end of the treatment by an investigator unaware of the treatment. The primary endpoint of this study was the incidence of mucositis every week during the 7-week period. The secondary endpoint was the effect of turmeric gargle on the incidence of treatment breaks, loss of scheduled treatment days, and decrease in body weight at the end of the treatment.

The study produced the following results:

“This study clearly suggests that when compared with the cohorts using povidone-iodine gargle, the group using turmeric as a mouthwash had delayed and reduced the levels of radiation-induced oral mucositis and was statistically significant at all time points ( : < 0.001 to : < 0.0001). Additionally, the cohorts using turmeric had decreased intolerable mucositis ( : < 0.001) and lesser incidence of treatment breaks in the first half of the treatment schedule before 4 weeks ( : < 0.01) and reduced change in body weight ( : < 0.001).”

They concluded:

“Gargling with turmeric by head and neck cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy provided significant benefit by delaying and reducing the severity of mucositis. Turmeric is readily available, relatively inexpensive, and highly accepted making it useful in cancer treatment.”

While this study focused primarily on turmeric’s ability to reduce the side effects of conventional treatment, and not the intrinsic anti-cancer properties of the spice itself, there is a good amount research indicating that turmeric is one of Nature’s most powerful, affordable, safest and easily accessible anti-cancer agent.  For a review of the literature we have accumulated on its health benefits read: 600 Reasons Why Turmeric May Be The World’s Most Important Herb. With over 1500 studies indicating its health value, many of which focusing on turmeric’s (and its primary polyphenol curcumin) ability to kill over 100 different types of cancer cell lines, it is no surprise to find research on its ability to kill head and neck cancer:

We can only hope that the growing body of experimental, preclinical and clinical support for the use of natural substances in cancer treatment will break throw into the practice of so-called ‘evidence-based’ medicine. It would seem that given its self-definition, modern medicine has an obligation to do exactly that; especially when the result will be the reduction of human suffering.

[i] Jemal A, Thomas A, Murray T, Thun M. Cancer statistics, 2002. CA Cancer J Clin. 2002; 52( 1): 23-47.

[ii] “Radiation Exposure and Contamination”. Merck Manuals. Retrieved 2 June 2013.

[iii] Plevovia P. Prevention and treatment of chemotherapy and radiotherapy induced oral mucositis: A review. Oral Oncol. 1999;35:453–70. [PubMed]

[iv] Suresh Rao, Chetana Dinkar, Lalit Kumar Vaishnav, Pratima Rao, Manoj Ponadka Rai, Raja Fayad, Manjeshwar Shrinath Baliga. The Indian Spice Turmeric Delays and Mitigates Radiation-Induced Oral Mucositis in Patients Undergoing Treatment for Head and Neck Cancer: An Investigational Study.