The Potential Role of Primary Radiation Toxemia in Pathogenesis of Radiation Damage to a Body in the Implementation of Radioprotective Properties of Radioprotectors under Conditions of Superlethal Exposure

The effect of ionizing radiation on the body in the form of structural lesions at the cellular level, primarily DNA (chromosomal aberrations), cell membranes, mitochondria, and other substructures causes release of many high-molecular compounds of various nature with antigenic properties from the cell into the blood and lymph flow. They can be a highly mobile group of proteins, damaged nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, extracellular ATP, oxidized low-density lipoproteins, and other products that contribute to the development of primary radiation stress with the activation of free radical peroxide processes and subsequent inflammatory reaction. With a certain high radiation load (from 20 to 50 Gy), primary radiation toxemia determines the thanatogenesis of acute radiation disease, which is clinically presented as a toxemic form. Since the early works, there has been a search for substances (radiotoxins) that cause mainly a picture of radiation toxemia. These included compounds of a quinoid nature and lipid peroxide products (works of the 1960s–1970s by A.M. Kuzin and Yu.B. Kudryashov). Over the past decades, V.M. Maliev’s fundamental research on large animals has identified a group of high-molecular compounds from a number of glycoproteins in the form of radiotoxins that experimentally reproduce all types and forms of acute radiation disease, including the toxemic form and cerebral syndrome in the absence of radiation exposure, and for each form of radiation damage, they are organ-specific. Attention is drawn to the high antiradiation efficiency of screening the abdominal area, where the contribution of hematopoietic tissue protection is very limited, which allows us to reach a conclusion about the high adverse contribution of “intestinal toxemia” to the development of a typical form of acute radiation disease. The significance of this factor in the thanatogenesis of acute radiation disease is especially pronounced when the antiradiation effect of radioprotectors is potentiated by screening the abdomen. According to the results of studying the antiradiation features of the emergency radioprotector indralin in experiments on dogs, DRF of the drug at a dose of 10 mg/kg increased from two to five, i.e., 2.5 times.