Changes in hemopoiesis of dying and surviving mice after fractionated irradiation and repeated bone marrow transplantation.

Mice received doses of 3 Gy of 60Co-gamma rays total body irradiation at four-day intervals up to a total dose of 24 Gy. After each dose per fraction half of the animals were injected with 10(6) bone marrow cells. At four- and nine-day intervals evaluations were made of the blood count, bone marrow and spleen cellularities, and spleen mass. In animals subjected only to irradiation the damage of hemopoietic organs was becoming deeper until the end of observation; the majority of these mice died by nine days after the irradiation with the last dose per fraction (by 37 days of the experiment). The authors consider anemia as the main cause of their death. All of the mice that were given bone marrow injections survived; nine days after the last dose of irradiation the mean cellularities of their bone marrows and spleens were 76.8% and 112.3% of the unirradiated controls respectively. In general, regeneration of erythropoiesis was quite successful, the number of thrombocytes was positively influenced, and the number of leukocytes nearly unchanged in bone marrow recipients when compared with the only irradiated mice. We observed two periods of maximum and one of minimum bone marrow and spleen regeneration, which were not synchronized. These results deny an unrepairable damage to the hemopoietic microenvironment in conditions of our experiment. This paper follows up with our preceding work [10] describing results of an experiment which ended on day 24.