Irradiation of Arbitrary Time Dependence: Damped-Oscillator Model of Organism's Response

There is evidence from experimental, ecological, and epidemiological studies that low doses of ionizing radiation may be beneficial to human health by causing an adaptive response. A quantitative phenomenological model has been reported earlier, where the time-evolution response to gamma radiation was modeled like the time evolution of a damped oscillator. The model predicted that an organism's resistance to radiation stress can be considerably improved by "radiation training"-preirradiation. Here, we report an improved more realistic model, taking into account not only the radiation dose rate but also the total radiation dose. The model, if verified by future experiments, might be used to considerably improve the efficacy of radiation therapy by enabling increased therapeutic doses.