Modeling space radiation induced cognitive dysfunction using targeted and non-targeted effects

Radiation-induced cognitive dysfunction is increasingly recognized as an important risk for human exploration of distant planets. Mechanistically-motivated mathematical modeling helps to interpret and quantify this phenomenon. Here we considered two general mechanisms of ionizing radiation-induced damage: targeted effects (TE), caused by traversal of cells by ionizing tracks, and non-targeted effects (NTE), caused by responses of other cells to signals released by traversed cells. We compared the performances of 18 dose response model variants based on these concepts, fitted by robust nonlinear regression to a large published data set on novel object recognition testing in rats exposed to multiple space-relevant radiation types (H, C, O, Si, Ti and Fe ions), covering wide ranges of linear energy transfer (LET) (0.22–181 keV/µm) and dose (0.001–2 Gy). The best-fitting model (based on Akaike information criterion) was an NTE + TE variant where NTE saturate at low doses (~ 0.01 Gy) and occur at all tested LETs, whereas TE depend on dose linearly with a slope that increases with LET. The importance of NTE was also found by additional analyses of the data using quantile regression and random forests. These results suggest that NTE-based radiation effects on brain function are potentially important for astronaut health and for space mission risk assessments.