Parental radiation exposure and children's health: are there effects on the second generation?

This paper describes the mechanisms through which parental occupational radiation exposure could affect children's health. It then goes on to review briefly some of the early work on this issue, studies based not on occupational exposures but on the Japanese atomic bomb survivors and on intrauterine x-ray exposure. Most of the discussion focuses on recent studies that have examined risks of childhood cancers and congenital malformations in the offspring of exposed workers, particularly some of the controversy engendered by recent cancer studies.