Recently, it has been proposed that the doses received from ¹³³Xe released during the accident in 1979 at the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant in Pennsylvania were much higher than has been conventionally assessed, due to a gross underestimation of the relative biological effectiveness of electrons from beta-particle-emitting radionuclides within the body. The central evidence cited in support of this proposal was the doses derived from cytogenetic analyses of blood sampled in the mid-1990s from people living near TMI at the time of the accident. However, the chromosome aberration data show a marked discrepancy in biodosimetric estimates evaluated from the frequencies of stable translocations and unstable dicentrics (corrected for temporal attenuation), strongly suggesting that exposures to clastogenic agents occurred long after the TMI accident. Few details have been reported on the people providing the blood samples and how they were selected for study. Crucially, this lack of information includes the distributions in the exposed and control groups of age at sampling, which is a critical factor in interpreting translocation data. Contrary to the recent claim, these cytogenetic data offer no support to the suggestion of a serious underestimation of internal doses from beta particles or from ¹³³Xe discharged during the TMI accident.

最近，有人提议从¹³³1979 年在宾夕法尼亚州三英里岛 (TMI) 工厂的事故中释放的 Xe 远高于常规评估的值，这是由于严重低估了体内发射 β 粒子的放射性核素的电子的相对生物有效性。支持这一提议的核心证据是 1990 年代中期从事故发生时居住在 TMI 附近的人们采集的血液样本的细胞遗传学分析得出的剂量。然而，染色体畸变数据显示，从稳定易位和不稳定双着丝粒的频率评估的生物剂量学估计值存在显着差异（针对时间衰减进行了校正），这强烈表明在 TMI 事故后很久就发生了致断裂剂的暴露。关于提供血液样本的人以及如何选择他们进行研究的细节很少被报道。至关重要的是，这种信息缺乏包括采样时暴露组和对照组年龄的分布，这是解释易位数据的关键因素。与最近的说法相反，这些细胞遗传学数据不支持严重低估来自 β 粒子或来自¹³³ Xe 在 TMI 事故中释放。