Ionising radiation: damage and cancer
Published 4 September 2008
© Crown copyright 2008
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There is very strong scientific evidence that the energy from radioactive material affects the cells of the body, mainly because of the damage it can cause to cellular genetic material known as DNA. DNA controls the way in which each individual cell behaves. At high doses enough cells may be killed by damage to DNA and other parts of the cell to cause great injury to the body and even rapid death. At lower doses there will be no obvious injury but a number of the cells that survive will have incorrectly repaired the DNA damage so that they carry mutations.
Some specific mutations leave the cell at greater risk of being triggered to become cancerous in the future. The body will already carry cells with these mutations from other causes but the ionising radiation exposure increases the number of these mutant cells. It therefore increases the chance of cancer development, usually after many years.
The scientific information that has been obtained worldwide leads Public Health England to believe that even the lowest dose of ionising radiation, whether natural or man-made, has a chance of causing cancer. The extra cancer risk from very low doses will be extremely small and, in practice, undetectable in the population. However the extra cancer risk at higher doses may be detectable using statistical methods. Even after high dose exposure it is rarely possible to be certain that radiation was directly responsible for a cancer arising in an individual.