how does acute radiation poisoning induce vomiting, nausea within just tens of minutes of exposure, and in more serious cases, instant loss of consciousnesses?
In: Biology
It kill cells all over your body and that is the result. If enough cells in the brain dies you become you loss of consciousnesses.
Been watching Chernobyl have you?
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The body doesn’t “understand” radiation poisoning, so when the body gets hit with a huge wave of radiation not normally seen in nature, the body interprets the massive body damage as regular poisoning that you’d get with spoiled food and starts the process of purging.
It doesn’t really have any way to react to or defend against radiation, but it can do what normally helps with illness or injury — induce vomiting to remove food that may be part of the problem (or just to stop the digestion process so the body can focus on other tasks), faint so you’re not doing things that may disrupt the healing process, and also faint to try to “reboot” the brain. None of this theoretically helps against radiation poisoning unless you ingested radioactive substances, but the body has to react somehow.
Radiation is especially damaging to soft tissues – skin, blood and blood vessels, GI tract, brain and nerves.
If you get a full body dose, the GI tract (stomach and intestines) are damaged and thats where the vomiting and nausea come from
Platelets are damaged and wounds and burns hemorrhage without an ability to stop bleeding
Take a big dose to the head, the brain and nerves are damaged, and along with the bleeding, it’s a terrible, terrible thing
The short and honest answer is that we don’t really know. The later effects of radiation poisoning are well understood, and is explained by how the cells are killed as they try to divide. This is a relatively slow effect that manifests during cell division. But it doesn’t explain the reasons for the onset of prompt effects (e.g. vomiting, diarrhea).
There simply isn’t enough research on this, and as far as I know, there are no solid theories for why these effects occur. The best answer we have is that the intestines are very sensitive to radiation, and a huge dose of radiation will probably trigger something in that system, which in turn will respond in the only way it can: vomiting & diarrhea.
However this does not explain other common effects like nausea, metallic taste, fatigue, headache, etc.
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Soft tissues are particularly vulnerable to radiation, and one of the ways radiation causes damage both by blowing holes in your DNA and other important molecular structures within cells. In the long term, this prevents cells from reproducing properly, therefore making healing impossible. In the short term, it kills a bunch of them. This causes a relatively rapid onset of symptoms. In lethal cases, they get progressively worse over time as the body cannot repair itself and slowly falls apart at a microscopic level, causing massive hemorrhaging and extreme pain.
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