Effects of ionising radiation on wild Japanese monkey fetuses

Body weight and head size relative to the CRL were lower in fetuses conceived after the NPP disaster compared with fetuses conceived prior to the NPP disaster. Japanese monkeys in Fukushima City first conceive in fall when they were five years old and gave birth in spring when they were six years old17. Thus, we assumed that all the mothers we examined that conceived babies after the NPP disaster were continuously exposed to radiation from at the time of the disaster in 2011.

Growth retardation of the fetuses could be caused by the deterioration of the mothers’ nutritional status. However, we did not observe any difference in the body fat index of mothers pre- and post-NPP disaster. Therefore, the growth retardation of the fetuses was unlikely to be associated with to the mothers’ nutritional status. Other factors such as climate changes or food nutrient components might have affected the growth of fetuses. The limitations of this study were that we were not able to obtain samples to look at histological change that might have contributed to the cause of delayed fatal growth and the sample size were relatively small because of the nature of the sampling collection. It might have been ideal to compare monkeys from the evacuation order area to monkeys from the non-contaminated area of Fukushima; however, there was no other area such besides the one in this study that performed systematic large-scale capturing aimed at seizing hundreds of monkeys. In addition, there had been access limitations beyond the evacuation order area. For these reasons, it is impossible to replicate an equivalent study elsewhere at this time.

In experiments using mice and rats, radiation exposure has been reported to cause reduced fetal weight, microcephaly, and reduced brain mass9,10,11,12,13,14,15. However, most of these experiments involved exposing the mother to a single radiation dose at a fetal age of 10 days or later when the brain undergoes development. Such exposure may be qualitatively different from the low-dose, long-term exposure following an NPP disaster. The radiation doses in these experiments varied substantially. Hande et al.9 exposed mice to 9 mGy of 70 kilo-Volt peak X-rays at fetal ages of 3.5, 6.5, and 11.5 days, and found that birth weight was reduced relative to the control mice in all cases. Uma Devi et al.15exposed mice to 0.25 Gy at a fetal age of 11.5 days and observed reduced head size at birth. In addition, they observed negative correlation between radiation dose and head size in fetuses exposed to 0.05 to 0.15 Gy.

The number of low birthweight children born to residents of some highly contaminated areas of Belarus increased between 1982 and 1990, after the Chernobyl NPP disaster18. Hujuel et al.19 conducted a longitudinal survey of women exposed to radiation through dental treatment who subsequently gave birth. They reported that women exposed to 0.4 mGy or more had increased risk (odds ratio 2.27) of giving birth to a child weighing 2500 g or less. Goldberg et al.20elucidated the relationship between the level of radiation exposure as a result of medical exams prior to conception and birthweight, and found that birthweight decreased by 37.6 g for every cGy of exposure. Such medical exposure is believed to affect the mother’s gonads and endocrine glands rather than the fetus itself. There is still uncertainly to determine whether the retarded growth we observed was a direct effect of the radiation exposure.

Otake and Schull8 conducted a temporal variation study of mothers exposed to radiation by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They did not observe any effect in newborns that had been exposed between fetal ages of 0 to 8 weeks, and the highest rates of microcephaly and other brain damage occurred in newborns exposed between fetal ages of 8 to 15 weeks. Given that the latter period was when the human brain undergoes rapid development, damage due to radiation exposure during this period might cause severe effect on fetuses.

The previous research suggested that the low birthweight and small head sizes observed in fetuses conceived after the NPP disaster were result of radiation exposure. However, we were not able to quantify the external and internal radiation dose in individual wild animals. Although radiocesium was detected in the muscles of all individuals captured after the NPP disaster, the cumulative exposure was unclear since the biological half-life of radiocesium in monkeys was approximately 3 weeks5. Furthermore, because of the small sample size, it was difficult to determine the causal relationship of exposure dosage and the effect on fetuses.

Although we showed that fetal proportional head size reduced after the NPP disaster, it was not possible to identify anatomically which part of the brain was developmentally retarded. Hossain et al.12 studied the brains of 6- to 12-month-old mice that were exposed to cobalt 60 at a fetal age of 14 days. Brain weight decreased at exposure rates of 0.5 to 1.5 Gy and the number of neurons in the hypothalamus in the CA3 region decreased significantly. We started to perform histological examination brain of fetuses and juvenile monkeys conceived after the NPP disaster to identify the regions of the brain that were developmentally retarded and the effect of retarded growth on post-natal development for further study.

Methods