By the time RERF was formed, in 1975, the focus had shifted to cancer and other diseases. Every few years, the group sums up its research. If anything, the risk is increasing, says Donald Pierce, a RERF researcher. For those exposed at ages less than 30 years, nearly half of the excess deaths during the entire 40 years of follow-up have occurred in the last five years. Furthermore, the younger you were at the time of the blast, the higher your risk of developing cancer, as we see in this graph.
Women have a much higher relative risk than men, for the same radiation exposure.
People who are younger at exposure have greater risk of radiation-induced cancer. Graph data courtesy of Dale Preston, RERF . The large amount of data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki have played crucial roles in setting radiation exposure standards around the world, since, for many years, there was little alternative data.