The potentiation by caffeine of X-ray damage to cultured human skin fibroblasts from normal subjects and ataxia-telangiectasia patients.

Caffeine was found to potentiate X-ray-induced killing of human diploid fibroblasts from a normal subject and an ataxia-telangiectasia (AT) patient when it was present at 2 mM concentration for 30 to 66 hr postirradiation. The dose-modifying factor for caffeine-treated normal cells had an average value of 1.26 +/- 0.13 which did not vary significantly with treatment time or X-ray dose. The dose-modifying factor for caffeine-treated AT cells was 1.12 +/- 0.12 at 30 hr, rose to 1.66 +/- 0.17 at 41 hr, and decreased to 1.31 +/- 0.13 at 66 hr. Thus no clear difference was observed between these two cell strains' susceptibility to postirradiation caffeine treatment.