Talk:Radiation enteropathy

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Perhaps drifting into original research

Rathfelder, thanks for your contributions and work to improve this topic.

My problem is that I've been studying the topic of nuclear war survival since 1969, when my mother became a Civil Defense Block Mother, back when we at least pretended to give a damn about the survival of the nation's people. So I can't right now point to a reference that fills in the gap in e.g. this National Organization for Rare Disorders item on Radiation Sickness, which says:

Cardiovascular/central nervous system sickness is the type of ARS produced by extremely high total body doses of radiation (greater than 3000 rads). This type is the most severe and is always fatal.

That was the fate of Cecil Kelley. At the other end:

Hematopoietic sickness (bone marrow sickness) is the type of ARS occurs at exposure of between 200 to 1000 rads.... During the latent period for this type, the lymph nodes, spleen and bone marrow begin to atrophy, leading to underproduction of all types of blood cells (pancytopenia).

This is probably what killed Harry Daghlian. And nowadays this can be treated with everything from supportive measures including infection control, to supplying various of those blood cells which are in deficit, to bone marrow transplant.

In-between:

Gastrointestinal sickness is the type of ARS that can occur when the total dose of radiation is lower but still high (400 or more rads). It is characterized by intractable nausea, vomiting, imbalance of electrolytes, and diarrhea that lead to severe dehydration, diminished plasma volume, vascular collapse, infection and life-threatening complications.

This is probably what killed Louis Slotin. As I understand it, while there's survivable levels of this, especially in oncology where you're potentially willing to make a trade-off of recoverable GI damage in the hope of killing a cancer (there are many references to this on the net), at a certain point before CNS sickness hits it becomes "invariably fatal", since we don't have anything like what we can do about hematopoietic problems, which pop up all the time (e.g. as of late my elderly father's immune system occasionally attacks his red blood cells).

I haven't been able to Google anything to explicitly support this synthesis, especially since we (fortunately) don't have a lot of data on all of these, and it's entirely possible I came up with it in my studies of nuclear war survival (I'll be hitting those books next). So I'm not sure how to flesh out this article to qualify the limits to treating it, how that's dose dependent, etc. But it shouldn't take too much effort. Hga (talk) 15:26, 9 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure you could find some general stuff to flesh it out a bit for now! Perfection is not required. Rathfelder (talk) 19:36, 9 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Major update

This stub needed significant additions which I have now made. Please add to this. Thanks. Jrfw51 (talk) 13:35, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]