Is low dose radiation therapy a potential treatment for COVID-19 pneumonia?

Codon Usage and Phenotypic Divergences of SARS-CoV-2 Genes

“…This LDIR exposure is not expected to exert significant selective pressure on the new coronavirus. Therefore, and based also on recent suggestions, one can hypothesize that a low dose treatment of 30 to 100 cGy to the lungs of a patient with COVID-19 pneumonia could ameliorate the inflammation significantly and relieve the life-threatening systemic symptoms of the infection [47]. Table 4.…”

Low dose radiation therapy for COVID-19 pneumonia: is there any supportive evidence?

“…Importantly, only one study was performed using a highly pathogenic viral trigger for the pneumonia, that of Dubin et al (1946). Based on this review, Kirkby and Mackenzie (2020) recently suggested that LDRT with a single acutely delivered dose to the lungs of 0.3-1 Gy of low-linear energy transfer (LET) radiation could be used to treat COVID-19 pneumonia with very low risk and with normal tissue toxicities avoided. Similarly, but with a slightly lower dose of low-LET radiation, Ghadimi-Moghadam et al (2020) have also suggested that a priming dose with a few mGy followed by a single dose of 0.1, 0.18 or 0.25 Gy could be used to treat COVID-19 pneumonia (0.25 Gy was selected because it is lower than the maximum dose of 0.26 Gy/year from natural background radiation in Ramsar, Iran).…”

“…Similarly, but with a slightly lower dose of low-LET radiation, Ghadimi-Moghadam et al (2020) have also suggested that a priming dose with a few mGy followed by a single dose of 0.1, 0.18 or 0.25 Gy could be used to treat COVID-19 pneumonia (0.25 Gy was selected because it is lower than the maximum dose of 0.26 Gy/year from natural background radiation in Ramsar, Iran). Both of these papers suggest clinical trials of LDRT for COVID-19 pneumonia (Ghadimi-Moghadam et al 2020;Kirkby and Mackenzie 2020). However, the body of evidence for a proposed beneficial effect of low dose radiation on viral pneumonia is clearly extremely slight.…”

“…Set against these possible beneficial effects, there is abundant evidence that radiation causes lung cancer in both sexes, with higher risk in females and smokers than males and nonsmokers, respectively. According to risk factors evaluated by the United Nations Scientific Committee on Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR 2008) based on the Japanese atomic bomb survivor data, the acutely delivered lung doses of 0.3-1 Gy proposed by Kirkby and Mackenzie (2020) would nominally induce 0.6-4.4 excess lung cancers in a hundred persons exposed. There is also accumulating evidence of association between moderate and low dose ionizing radiation and most types of circulatory disease (Little et al 2012;Little 2016).…”

Flying by the seat of our pants: is low dose radiation therapy for COVID-19 an option?

“…Recently, discussion of the much neglected paradigm of low dose radiation therapy (LDRT) has been revived by the proposal that it might constrain the COVID-19 viral pneumonia associated with the pandemic scourge by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Kirkby and Mackenzie 2020). Any such use would have to be measured against the fact that the vast majority of patients get well without medical intervention (Wu and McGoogan 2020), and that a number of other anti-inflammatory and anti-viral reagents are available for testing (Arnaldez et al 2020; FDA Reagan-Udall Foundation 2020; NIH News Releases 2020).…”