On an extended understanding of the term hormesis for denoting alternating directions of the organism's response to increasing adverse exposures

The authors propose to consider as hormesis phenomenon not only a realization of the Arndt-Schulze rule but any non-monotonic dose-response relationship for a certain outcome that is characterized by changing direction of a response between adjacent ranges of doses of an initiator of this response, the number of such ranges being two or more. This approach is illustrated with results of several in vitro experiments on different established cell lines exposed to CdS or PbS nanoparticles.

Automated summary

The authors propose to consider hormesis phenomenon as any non-monotonic dose-response relationship characterized by changing direction of response between adjacent doses, with at least two or more such dose ranges. This approach is illustrated with results of in vitro experiments on different cell lines exposed to CdS or PbS nanoparticles.