Thyroid mass in children and adolescents living in the most exposed areas to Chernobyl fallout in Belarus

This paper aims to determine the thyroid volumes in children and teenagers living in Gomel and Mogilev Oblasts, which are the areas of Belarus that were most affected by the Chernobyl accident. Results of thyroid volume measurements performed in 1991–1996 by the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation were used to evaluate the variation by age of the thyroid volumes for girls and boys aged from 5 to 16 y. Thyroid volumes for age groups without measurements were also estimated. For a given age and gender, the differences between children from Gomel and Mogilev Oblasts do not exceed 12 %, which is relatively small when the variability of individual values is considered. For children of a given age, the individual values show a variability characterised by geometric standard deviation (GSD) of 1.25–1.4. Values of thyroid mass that were derived from the measured thyroid volumes are being used within the framework of the on-going Belarusian-American cohort study of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases after the Chernobyl accident to estimate with more accuracy the thyroid doses that were received by the cohort members.