Study Finds Short-Term Space Travel Has Impact on Human Body
TapTechNews June 17th news, a new study has found that even short-term space travel can have an impact on the human body. Four people who carried out a three-day space mission in September 2021 experienced physical and cognitive changes, including slight decline in cognitive ability, increased immune system stress, and altered cellular genes. Related research results were published in the journal Nature and other relevant journals on Tuesday.
Fortunately, almost all of these changes have returned to normal after the astronauts returned to Earth. The study did not find that these changes would pose a significant threat to future space travelers, but it also highlights that medical researchers' understanding of the impacts of space travel is still limited.
Dr. Christopher Mason, a professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and one of the lead investigators of this study, said at a Monday press conference that these papers and data are the most in-depth examination we have ever done on astronauts.
According to TapTechNews, the four astronauts who carried out the mission called Inspiration4 are not professional astronauts. This mission is the first orbital flight mission in history without the participation of professional astronauts. The mission was led by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who instead of taking friends with him, recruited three passengers from different fields of society: Haley Arceneaux, a physician assistant who survived cancer as a child, Sian Proctor, a community college professor teaching Earth sciences, and Christopher Sembroski, an engineer.
The Inspiration4 crew agreed to participate in medical experiments and collected blood, urine, feces, and saliva samples during the flight and allowed these data to be uploaded to an online public archive called Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA).
The SOMA database also contains relevant data from other private space mission participants and data from Japanese astronauts who had been to the International Space Station. In addition, it also includes comparative study data of American astronaut Scott Kelly and his twin brother Mark Kelly. Scott Kelly stayed at the International Space Station for 340 days in 2015-2016, while Mark Kelly is a retired astronaut and currently serves as a senator in Arizona.
With the emergence of more and more private space travel projects, the SOMA database is expected to accumulate more data rapidly, covering a wider range of people than the white male astronauts selected in the early days of the space age, which will help develop treatment methods for individual astronauts to counter the impacts of space travel.
These rich information also enable scientists to compare the impacts of short-term tasks with those of long-term tasks. During Scott Kelly's one-year space mission, the telomeres in his DNA (an aging marker) became longer, indicating that he became biologically younger. But after returning to Earth, the length of his telomeres returned to near the pre-departure level and even shorter in some parts than before departure. Scientists believe that this is a sign of accelerated aging. The telomeres of the Inspiration4 astronauts also experienced a process of growth and shortening, indicating that these changes occur in all astronauts and happen very quickly.
The lead researcher of telomere research, Dr. Susan Bailey, a professor of radiation cancer biology and oncology at Colorado State University, called this finding highly significant. Cells use RNA (a single-stranded nucleic acid) to convert the DNA blueprint in to protein production instructions, Dr. Bailey said, and the RNA of astronauts also changed, and similar changes have also been observed in people climbing Mount Everest. This suggests that the cause of telomere length change may not be weightlessness, but the radiation bombardment that the human body suffers in high altitude and space environments.
The impacts of space travel are not only that. Dr. Ashaf Beheshti from the Blue Marble Space Institute of California and the NASA Ames Research Center pointed out that the kidneys of astronauts also showed changes at the molecular level, which may herald the formation of kidney stones. This may not be a problem in a three-day space travel, but it may evolve into a medical crisis for long-term tasks.
But now that this possibility is known, researchers can start to develop methods to prevent kidney stones or improve treatment methods.
Astronauts also used iPads to carry out some tests to assess their cognitive performance in space. One of the tests evaluated psychomotor vigilance, the ability to focus on a task and maintain attention. The test requires astronauts to watch a box on the screen and then a timer will suddenly appear in the box to record the time of pressing the button.
If the reaction time is too long (more than 355 milliseconds), it is considered as not being focused. On average, compared with when the Inspiration4 astronauts carried out the same test on the ground, the performance in space decreased. The cognitive performance of astronauts was not affected in space, but the reaction speed slowed down.
Since returning to Earth, in many ways the lives of some of the Inspiration4 astronauts have returned to the state before entering space.