Treatment for victim from radiation overdose

[darkar]

Is there any treatment to cure those victim who got radiation overdose?

 

[Monique]

I don't think there really is anything you can do, the body needs to heal the tissues that have been damaged by the radiation.

There are some cases where patients are put into a hyperbaric chamber, to increase the oxygen delivery to the damaged tissues, since local bloodvessels might be damaged.

 

[Rade]

See these links:
http://medicineportal.andrewolmsted.com/radiation-therapy-treatment.html
http://www.asi.org/adb/m/03/11/radiation-treatment.html
http://hps.org/newsandevents/meetings/annual/50annual74.html

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

I guess it's sort of analogous to burns, whilst you can't cure them, you can do a fair amount to mitigate the effects and help recovery.

I seem to remember the injection of iodine into the bloodstream will help to stop radioactive idodine found in nuclear accident sites from being absorbed by the thyroid gland.

Here's some details and other treatments.

http://www.chemistry.org/portal/a/c/s/1/feature_ent.html?id=c373e9f5f2d57e5c8f6a4fd8fe800100"

 

[daveb]

It depends on how much dose a person receives. The dose at which 50% of the population dies within 60 days without treatment is about 500 rem acute whole body dose. At this dose (called hemopoeitic syndrome), a person's bone marrow is sharply ablated and there is serious risk of infections. There is usally some hemorrhaging as well. However, with modern medical treatments (such as transfusions, clean rooms, etc.) the risk of death is reduced, though the victim can continue to have complications for months. At higher doses, the GI tract is affected, which complicates matters even more. At doses high enough to affect the central nervous system (around 1000 remwhole body), the only real treatments are palliative. At really high doses (2500 rem+), the vicitm is usually unconscious within a few hours and dies in several days.
Please note that these doses are hundreds of times the annual maximum dose allowed by regulatory agencies, and thousands of times the natural background radiation. This means the only real way to get this kind of dose is accidentally.