Endocrine Abstracts

Background: According to the statistics of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, before the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the incidence of thyroid cancer in children under 14 years of age was on average 0.04 per 100,000 children, however long-term consequences of the accident have not been analyzed.

Material and methods: We studied the incidence of thyroid cancer during the last 35 years in Ukraine in children under the age of 14 and 18 y.o. based on the statistics of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.

Results: Ten years after the Chernobyl accident, the incidence of thyroid cancer in children increased 10 times in children under 14 years of age. Then this indicator gradually decreased and in 2006-2010 reached its lowest level. But, starting from 2010, the incidence of thyroid cancer began to increase again and almost 35 years after the accident, it again reaches critical indicators and remains at a high level. The incidence of thyroid cancer in children under the age of 18 during the last 10 years has remained at the level of 0.48 per 100,000 with the largest number of thyroid cancer cases occurring in children from the most contaminated regions after the accident. Some decrease in the incidence rate in 2019-2020 may be due to the COVID pandemic and restrictions of the movement of children for a complete examination and surgical treatment. During the period 2002-2021, thyroid cancer was diagnosed and operated on in 174 children under the age of 18

Conclusions: Since the largest number of cancer cases during the last 10 years was among children from the regions that were the most contaminated after the accident in 1986, and whose parents were exposed to negative radiation exposure, we can assume a cumulative remote effect on the formation of cancer in the second generation of victims of the Chernobyl accident