Cytogenetic studies of populations exposed to Chernobyl fallout

This review considers chromosome aberration studies, mainly using the dicentric assay, of persons continuously resident in areas of Chernobyl fallout and others, evacuated from highly contaminated places, and relocated sometimes to areas of lesser contamination. It has been possible to use cytogenetics to estimate group mean doses that could be used as representative of dose to the wider communities from which the study subjects were drawn. This is an important supplement to physical reconstruction of doses as an input to epidemiology. There are indications from the cytogenetics that in some instances, modelling committed doses from environmental monitoring data have underestimated the population dose.