Welcome to Our Blog
Thank you for visiting our website. We are a relatively small lab with big ideas. We are part of a much larger group of investigators known collectively as the LLUMC Molecular Radiation Biology Laboratories. It is our hope that this website will educate, communicate, and incite scientific debate. As the PI of our little group, I hope to post our data and discuss potential mechanisms, consequences, and countermeasures. With a bit of luck we'll all learn something. The links to the left include our merry band as well as collaborating investigators and laboratories. The links to the right include our archive and blogroll. The banner above will always bring you back to the main page page. Take a look around and please feel free to leave a comment on our blog (try to keep it civil and constructive) or shoot us an e-mail. - Michael " Ubertramp " Pecaut
One more time…
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2008.08.02
Categories & Tags: Bone,Brookhaven National Laboratory,Clemson,High-Energy Iron Radiation,NASA,Rats
Comments: None
As I said in my earlier post, we were waiting for a couple more publications to start showing up in PubMed. Another one hit yesterday. This one is a result of our collaboration with Ted Bateman at Clemson University. He has a great group over there looking at spaceflight effects on bone. Up until recently, he was focusing primarily on microgravity and disuse models with several biomed applicable studies. More recently, he’s shifted a bit to include radiation exposure and radiotherapy. Once his initial studies started showing some interesting results, his whole group hit the ground running and they’ve already published several papers on this exciting work. This is one of them, recently published in Radiation Research.
Bone architectural and structural properties after (56)fe(26+) radiation-induced changes in body mass.
Willey JS, Grilly LG, Howard SH, Pecaut MJ, Obenaus A, Gridley DS, Nelson GA, Bateman TA.
High-energy, high-charge (HZE) radiation, including iron ions ((56)Fe(26+)), is a component of the space environment. We recently observed a profound loss of trabecular bone in mice after whole-body HZE irradiation. The goal of this study was to examine morphology in bones that were excluded from a (56)Fe(26+) beam used to irradiate the body. Using 10-week-old male Sprague-Dawley rats and excluding the hind limbs and pelvis, we irradiated animals with 0, 1, 2 and 4 Gy (56)Fe(26+) ions and killed them humanely after 9 months. Animals grew throughout the experiment. Trabecular bone volume, connectivity and thickness within the proximal tibiae were significantly lower than control in a dose-dependent manner. Irradiated animals generally had less body mass than controls, which largely accounted for the variability in bone parameters as determined by ANCOVA. Likewise, lower cortical parameters were associated with reduced mass. However, lesser trabecular thickness in the 4-Gy group could not be attributed to body mass alone. Indicators of bone metabolism were generally unchanged, suggesting stabilized turnover. Exposure to (56)Fe(26+) ions can alter trabecular microarchitecture in shielded bones. Reduced body mass seems to be correlated with these deficits of trabecular and cortical bone.
