Radiation-induced carcinogenesis: individual sensitivity and genomic instability.

In spite of a well-known relationship between exposure to radiation and increased risk for cancer development, the biological mechanisms involved in radiation-induced carcinogenesis remain poorly documented. Various hypotheses are discussed in this paper. It appears that radiation cannot be directly responsible for the numerous genetic alterations of cancer cells. Most of them occur during tumor progression. Only one or a very limited number of them was induced by radiation many years before tumor growth. This long delay is a major difficulty for experimental research and raises many questions. Recently, it has been shown that a genomic instability occurs after many generations in cells descending from irradiated cells. This instability leads to multiple genetic alterations and, preferentially, affects some chromosome structures, particularly telomeres. This kind of telomeric instability - related to the shortening of telomeric DNA sequences - has also been observed in senescent cells as well as in non-senescent cells from patients predisposed to cancer, and this process may possibly also occur in the progeny of irradiated cells.