Outcomes of Parental Occupational Exposure to Radiation: Child and Pre-reproductive Mortality

Introduction: Child and pre-reproductive mortality are the indicators of social well-being of the society and a valuable parameter in assessing health effects of parental occupational exposure in offspring.

Objective: To assess child and pre-reproductive mortality among the offspring of the workers of the Mayak Production Association, the first Russian nuclear facility.

Materials and methods: A retrospective epidemiological study was conducted in the town of Ozyorsk, the nearest to the facility closed administrative area, involving 24,780 children born in 1949–1973. The case group consisted of 14,435 children of Mayak PA workers while the control group comprised 10,345 children of unexposed parents. Child and prereproductive mortality rates were analyzed by sex, calendar periods of birth, disease, and age of parents at childbirth. Risk coefficients were calculated based on dose categories of parental occupational exposure to radiation.

Results: We observed higher rates of child and pre-reproductive mortality among the controls. Perinatal conditions and childhood infectious diseases made a considerable contribution to child and pre-reproductive mortality in both groups. Infections as a cause of death in the controls were statistically more frequent than in the offspring of the nuclear industry workers. The risk of death in the first five years of life and until the age of 15 in the case group was significantly lower in the parental age at childbirth categories of 21–25 and 31–35 years, which does not exclude an important role of initial health parameters of the parents and the level of social well-being of the families. The analysis of the relationship between parental accumulated absorbed doses of external gamma exposure at work and child and pre-reproductive mortality in the offspring showed no excess risk.

Conclusions: The results of studying child and pre-reproductive mortality among the offspring of Mayak workers gave no convincing evidence of radiation-induced health effects in the children born to the exposed parents.

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