Organisms survive best, or show high fitness, in the habitats in which they most commonly occur, a phenomenon referred to as hormesis in the literature of toxicology. Examples of hormesis accumulate rapidly in the literature. However, a lack of underlying models has led many to doubt its existence, especially for ionizing radiation. The evolutionary model developed here indicates that all poten...

Three aspects of hormesis with low doses of ionizing radiation are presented: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is acceptance by France, Japan, and China of the thousands of studies showing stimulation and/or benefit, with no harm, from low dose irradiation. This includes thousands of people who live in good health with high background radiation. The bad is the nonacceptance of radiatio...

Evidence of health benefits and longer average life-span following low-dose irradiation should replace fear, “all radiation is harmful,” and “the perception of harm” as the basis for action in the 21 century. Hormesis is the excitation, or stimulation, by small doses of any agent in any system. Large doses inhibit. “Low dose” is defined as any dose between ambient levels of radiation and the th...

This paper examines the underlying factors that contributed to the marginalization of radiation hormesis in the early and middle decades of the 20th century. The most critical factor affecting the demise of radiation hormesis was a lack of agreement over how to define the concept of hormesis and quantitatively describe its dose-response features. If radiation hormesis had been defined as a mode...

Routine diagnostic X-rays (e.g., chest X-rays, mammograms, computed tomography scans) and routine diagnostic nuclear medicine procedures using sparsely ionizing radiation forms (e.g., beta and gamma radiations) stimulate the removal of precancerous neo-plastically transformed and other genomically unstable cells from the body (medical radiation hormesis). The indicated radiation hormesis arises...

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with a better understanding of radiation hormesis, the investigational research that supports or does not support the theory, and the relationship between the theory and current radiation safety guidelines and practices. The concept of radiation hormesis is known to nuclear medicine technologists, but understanding its complexities and the hi...

The word “hormesis” is derived from the Greek word “hormaein” meaning: “to excite,” which is the origin of the word “hormone.” In 1902, the English physiologist, E. Starling, discovered that an acid extract from the human duodenum contained a substance designated as secretin that, when discharged into the bloodstream, stimulated the pancreas to release its secretions when food has passed throug...

OBJECTIVE Nuclear medicine technologists work under significant radiation protection constraints. These constraints are based on the linear no-threshold (LNT) radiation paradigm, which was developed in the 1960s and was based largely on the deleterious effects of radiation as they were understood at the time. More recently, the theory of radiation hormesis, or a beneficial effect of low-level e...

It is well known that ionizing radiation is currently a very important way to create genetic variability that is not exists in nature or that is not available to the breeder (Ahloowalia & Maluszynski, 2001; Lemus et al., 2002). Therefore, there are many papers aimed to determine the best radiation dose to applied in plant breeding work. As a result it has been defined intervals gamma radiation ...