Distribution of SCEs in lymphocytes in persons with normal, slightly increased, and heavily increased SCEs.
The distribution of SCEs in lymphocytes was examined for 165 healthy persons (58 non-smokers and 107 smokers with cigarette consumption ranging from 1 to greater than 20 per day), and for 1 patient treated with melphalan, a cytostatic drug. The data from the healthy persons did not follow a Poisson distribution. A mixed Poisson that allowed different lambda values for the 30 cells scored from each person and postulated a gamma distribution for the lambda s within the 30 cells fitted all the data examined including those from the melphalan-treated patient. In the latter case the 7 samples taken at various times after the treatment could all be represented satisfactorily with a common parameter, c, in the gamma distribution for the lambda s, even though the mean SCEs/cell varied from 9.8 to 36.8. Because the c parameter determines the spread of lambda values within the 30 cells, this suggested that the effect of the cytostatic drug was to increase all the lambda s by a constant amount. The sum of the SCEs taken over all 30 cells in a sample is a convenient summary statistic, and the transformation y = square root s + square root s + 1 behaves as a normal variate with a constant variance within a group.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D003434:Crossing Over, Genetic / Q000187:drug effects; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008214:Lymphocytes / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D008558:Melphalan / Q000627:therapeutic use; D008875:Middle Aged; D009101:Multiple Myeloma / Q000188:drug therapy* / Q000235:genetics; D012016:Reference Values; D012854:Sister Chromatid Exchange / Q000187:drug effects; D012907:Smoking
D000970:Antineoplastic Agents; D008558:Melphalan