Developing a theoretical predictive model for cellular response to combined actions of low radiation and hyperthermia

Complete text of publication follows. Background: Organisms in their living environment are not exposed to merely a single stress agent. Several factors such as radiation and heat may simultaneously exert their stressful effect to the organisms. The combined exposure to two stressors can result in an enhanced effect that would be expected from the addition of the separate exposures to individual agents. Objective: This study has been undertaken to develop a theoretical model for assessment of combined effects of low dose radiation and mild heat for predictive cellular response assay. Rationale: Present study was motivated from the belief that synergism may occur in terms of lethal lesions arising from the interaction of non-lethal sub-lesions induced by individual agents. The sub-lesions induced by each agent may be negligible or undetectable. But, there exists a possibility of some cross talk between sublesions produced by radiation and heat. These processes may reflect the real mechanisms for inflicting the lethal damage by otherwise ignorable or undetectable insults to exposed organisms. Results: A theoretically developed mathematical model of the synergy was formulated which was tested for validation on the experimental data. The model predictions fairly closely corresponded with several experimental results. .The significance of synergistic effects for radiation biology has been demonstrated. A number of common peculiarities of synergistic interactions were found to play their roles. A unified biophysical concept for synergistic interaction has been suggested. Conclusions: For a constant dose rate, synergistic interaction between radiation and hyperthermia especially at low intensity is realized only within a certain range of temperature, independently of the target object analyzed. For temperatures below the range, the synergistic effect was not observed and cell killing was mainly determined by the damage induced by ionizing radiation. On the contrary, the synergistic effect for temperature above the range was also not observed but cell killing was chiefly caused by hyperthermia. On the basis of the results obtained, it is fairly inferred that, for any constant temperature, there should be an optimal intensity of ionizing radiation which could result in the greatest synergy.