Estimating thyroid masses for children, infants, and fetuses in Ukraine exposed to (131)I from the Chernobyl accident

For the purpose of improving retrospective internal thyroid dose estimations for children and adolescents following the Chernobyl accident, age- and gender-dependent thyroid masses have been estimated for the children of Kiev and Zhytomyr oblasts, which are two of the most contaminated regions of Northern Ukraine. For children ages 6-16 y, the thyroid masses were based on the measurements by ultrasound of the thyroid volumes of about 60,000 children performed by the Sasakawa Memorial Health Foundation in the 1990s. For children aged 0 to 36 mo, because thyroid mass values for Ukrainian children were not found in the literature, autopsies were performed for the specific purpose of this paper. Thyroid mass values for children aged 3-5 and 17-18 y were either interpolated or extrapolated from the measured data sets. The results for children aged 6-16 y indicate that the thyroid masses of rural children are, on average, slightly higher (by about 8%) than the thyroid masses of urban children. The geometric means of the thyroid masses were estimated as 5.2 g, 9.0 g, and 15.8 g for boys and 5.2 g, 9.4 g, and 16.0 g for girls aged 5, 10, and 15 y, respectively. Those values are greater than the reference values that ICRP recommends for iodine-sufficient populations, thus reflecting the fact that the northern part of Ukraine is iodine-deficient.