Structural analysis of mortality of the persons irradiated in childhood as a result of the accident at the Chornobyl NPP and living at the radioactively contaminated territories of Ukraine

Abstract

Objective: We studied the structure of mortality of the persons who were the children at a time of the Chornobyl accident and lived at the most radioactively contaminated territories of Ukraine. Materials and methods: The study covered more than 31,000 people born in 1968-1986 who lived in 1986-2011 in Ivankiv, Polisske, Narodichi, and Ovruch regions of Ukraine. We analyzed retrospectively the materials of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and summarized information about 2,100 dead mentioned in these materials. The retrospective, demographic, mathematical-and-statistical, and software-technological (Microsoft Excel, license number X12 53766) methods of the analysis were applied. Results and discussion: The structure of the causes of death was established to be dominated by exogenous reasons (50.41 %). Somatic pathology makes up 43.09 %, symptoms, signs, and indistinctly defined states - 6.55 %. The diseases of circulatory system, diseases of digestive system, symptoms, signs and indistinctly defined conditions, mental disorders, diseases of nervous system, neoplasms, certain infectious and parasitic diseases became the leading classes of endogenous mortality of the male cohort; the neoplasm, disease of circulatory system, diseases of digestive system, certain infectious and parasitic diseases, diseases of respiratory system became the leading classes of endogenous mortality of the female cohort, in total it makes up 48.9% of 32.3 % of the number of deaths, respectively. There is a tendency to the increase of mortality levels of the male population in comparison with the female one. For the identification of the causes of lower vitality of male subcohort it is necessary to perform the deep studies with the identification of possible links of mortality with the exposure dose levels and duration of chronic exposure.