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Space Medicine

Long Space Missions Take a Toll On Astronaut Brains, Study Finds 54

Posted by BeauHD from the spaceflight-related-changes dept.
A new study suggests that long missions and frequent voyages to space may have an impact on astronaut brains. Space.com reports: The most enduring spaceflight-related changes in the brain yet detected are the way cavities in the brain known as ventricles can enlarge by up to 25%. Ventricles are filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which helps protect, nourish and remove waste from the brain. The absence of a gravitational pull leads the brain to shift upward in the skull and causes the ventricles to expand. It remains uncertain what the long-term consequences of this ventricle expansion might be. "How this impacts performance and long-term health is an open question," study senior author Rachael Seidler, a space health researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told Space.com.

One mystery regarding this ventricle expansion is whether it differs with factors such as varying mission length, the number of previous missions flown, or time between missions. To find out, Seidler and her colleagues scanned the brains of 30 astronauts using MRI before and after spaceflight. They looked at eight astronauts who went on two-week missions, 18 on six-month missions, and four who went on longer missions of up to one year. The scientists found that longer spaceflight missions resulted in greater ventricle swelling, most of which happened during the first six months in space. "The biggest jump comes when you go from two weeks to six months in space," Seidler said in a statement. "There is no measurable change in the ventricles' volume after only two weeks."

Given the rise in space tourism in recent years, these findings may prove welcome, as shorter space trips appear to cause little physical change to the brain. In addition, the rate of ventricle enlargement tapered off after six months in space, which may also be good news â" these changes don't continue to increase over time, Seidler said. "This is important to know for future longer duration missions, such as to Mars," she noted. The scientists also found that less than three years between spaceflights may not provide enough time to give the ventricles enough time to fully recover to how they were before spaceflight. "This is a surprisingly long time," Seidler said. The researchers plan to examine long-term health in astronauts, "including testing crewmembers out to five years post-flight," said Seidler. "This will help enormously in terms of understanding the potential implications of the current results. But the work is expected to take 10 years."

The research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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Long Space Missions Take a Toll On Astronaut Brains, Study Finds More

Long Space Missions Take a Toll On Astronaut Brains, Study Finds

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  • So much that NASA could have learned from Star Trek.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      It would require a wheel roughly 3/4 of a mile in diameter before the spin stopped causing problems. But it would be doable.

      • The diameter of the wheel required for 1 standard gravity is going to depend entirely upon the angular velocity- i.e., the rpm.

        Where do you get 3/4th of a mile as a requirement?

        • Re:Rotating wheel space station maybe? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday June 09, 2023 @07:46AM (#63588236) Homepage Journal

          It was the standard figure put forward in documentaries concerning the possibility of building wheel-style spacestations. You need the angular velocity to be sufficiently low as to not cause motion sickness, whilst sufficiently high to cause the necessary centripetal force. The claim made was that a diameter of 3/4 of a mile was the smallest that would achieve both of these objectives.

          I have not verified this claim, but it seems reasonable.

          • We don't know how much acceleration it would take to prevent the most serious health effects. It might be a fraction of a g. We also don't know how big the wheel would have to be to prevent motion sickness because that also has never been tested.
            • We can carry out experiments on people''s sensation of motion sickness at different rates of change of acceleration. I've spent 30 years working at sea, in wave states up to 25m heave and frequencies from about 1Hz to 10s or 20ths of a Hz. It's quite amenable to experimentation.

              And you'll find that people are quite variable. I'm not particularly susceptible to motion sickness (now ; I was before puberty. Go figure.), but I've had colleagues rendered unable to work by motion sickness - which meant I had to

          • I wonder how the test would be designed to confirm those parameters.

            0g most definitely is unnatural and does make people feel sick, so it seems unlikely you'd need a full 1g with no perceptible angular velocity to be a big improvement.

            • A retractable cable with a counterweight on one end and a capsule on the other. Slowly let the cable out over time while adjusting RPM to create 1G at different lengths. Take measurements at predetermined stop points along the way.

          • I've no idea where you get this claim. Even if you're cheap, it's fairly easy to build a habitat on a tether, say with a matching habitat on the other end, to provide enough distance and spin to avoid confusing coriolis effects.

          • I don't get why high angular velocity would lead to motion sickness.
            Certainly, if you were looking out a window maybe...
            Or, if one were say, "climbing a ladder" the force would change based on how far away you were from the final radius.. And that would be all kinds of not fun for the inner ear... But just walking along the edge, your body wouldn't be able to distinguish between 100,000rpm and 1.
            • (except the obvious fact that there's no radius where 100krpm doesn't equal far more than 1g- it occurs to me that was a bad number to pick to assert the principle of equivalence between inertial frames :P)

            • Or, if one were say, "climbing a ladder" the force would change ...

              Very true. So ... why would you design your spacecraft so that you ever needed to climb a ladder? Just put everything on one level.

              OK : revision - you might need a couple of metres of "head" for plumbing, above "head room". But you're only going to need to ascend/ descend to the header tank/ sump during maintenance.

      • ... a wheel roughly 3/4 of a mile in diameter ...

        Nope. Unless you think 1/4 is roughly 3/4.

        Check out https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/ [artificial-gravity.com] and try 224m in radius (.27 miles in diameter)

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • NASA did a lot of experimentation on this sort of thing in the 60s and early 70s, and the design guidelines they published in the mid-70s called for a maximum rotation rate of a couple of RPM - the lower the better. That allows for minimum rotation radii of under 100m. Which is a much more constructable object than your 3/4 mile thing.

        If reality shows that 90% of the bad effects of microgravity (note the explicit millionth-fold factor there!) can be achieved with 0.25 g, the necessary dimensions become eve

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jsepeta ( 412566 )

      Like in the Green Slime!

      https://www.google.com/url?sa=... [google.com]

    • It seems like we really should hurry up and invent artificial gravity.

  • Zombie Scientists Announce (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday June 09, 2023 @03:01AM (#63587746)

    Long Space Missions Take a Toll On Astronaut Brains - it makes them tough, chewy, and less flavorful.

    • makes them tough, chewy, and less flavorful.

      Humans should defund their silly program to send adventurers to space. It’s a huge waste when I’m starving right here on earth. Did you know we have yet to explore much of our own planet? If I were a human king I’d start by sending adventurers under bridges and into mountain caves.

      • Care to explain if I were a human king
        Most folks would be okay with If I were a king or did you think that most readers just got out of a Broadway matinee show of Lion king

        • Care to explain if I were a human king

          I am arguably a king but I am a greater troll and not a pathetic human or weakling lesser troll as you commonly encounter on Slashdot.

          Lion king

          If I encountered a Lion King I would eat him naturally. Also I am banned from broadway shows for eating the performers.

  • aliens (Score:3)

    by ZERO1ZERO ( 948669 ) on Friday June 09, 2023 @03:36AM (#63587784)
    so this explains possibly why greys have elongated heads . its their brains expanding due to low gravity

  • Let's go to mars then, I'm sure that is going to be perfectly fine.

    • There will be an alternate poster coming out soon, it will be known worldwide as the infamous (you know, more than famous) legendary "brain on drugs" poster. Former or out-of-work astronauts welcome; cosmonauts too comrade

  • Would you rather your life was lived free of adventure?

  • D' oh! (Score:3)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Friday June 09, 2023 @04:39AM (#63587888)

    They were going along pretty well, then they spewed about Mars.

    No, humans are not going to Mars. Those were books and/or movies about the distant future, they were not goalposts we can, or need to, meet in the short term.

    It is too far, and... "There is noone there to raise them, if you did." There is nothing to learn except irrelevant details about which parts of their bodies shut down first as they die. There is no job for them to do on Mars that we can't do better by remote control.

    • >>There is no job for them to do on Mars that we can't do better by remote control.

      Dig ten feet down.

      • The first attempt at digging a couple of metres down on Mars didn't work. So they'll try a different mechanism next time. Lather, rinse, repeat until they find one that does work.

        It's called experimentation. It doesn't always work the first time.

        (The first 3 or 4 experiments on digging a few cm below the Martian surface did of course work.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      No, humans are not going to Mars.

      There is no job for them to do on Mars that we can't do better by remote control.

      As for your second mistake. There is plenty a human can do that a robot can't. The big one is, think on the spot.

    • Every great adventure in human history has brought about huge learning opportunities and advances. You sound like a medieval preacher keeping the masses at bay to stay relevant. The days of throwing Galileo in the tower have long past.

  • Not as bad as you might think ... (Score:3)

    by quenda ( 644621 ) on Friday June 09, 2023 @05:01AM (#63587924)

    https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]

    A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.

    Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image of the patient’s brain, above left).

    • Ask Portia [wikipedia.org] all about it...

      Stalking dangerous prey in three dimensional space with a surprisingly small number of neurons is no mean feat...

  • They keep putting the blame in the wrong place.

  • First is lymph system doesn't have a pump like the heart, its mostly gravity and movement encouraged.
    Second is reactivation of latent viruses like Epstein-Barr virus due to stress and radiation
    --
    Reactivation of latent Epstein-Barr virus: A comparison after exposure to gamma, proton, carbon, and iron radiation https://www.mdpi.com/345054 [mdpi.com]
    Epstein–Barr virus shedding by astronauts during space flight https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
    Latent and lytic EpsteinBarr virus gene expression in the peripheral bloo

  • The concept of spinning a hab on a string is old as dirt, and getting the thing up there in the first place is massively more complicated than doing so. The only reasons we don't have a properly artificial gravity station are massively over-conservative planners at NASA and lack of funding. It's not that hard. Just commit to the extra weight and do it, and we won't need to worry about half measures like trying to get by in zero g. We can worry about living long periods of time in zero g much later when we h

  • "There is no measurable change in the ventricles' volume after only two weeks."

    No. Their sample could not prove that there was a change in volume after two weeks. They ran the statistical test and that said: This experiment does not prove there was a change. It does NOT prove that there was no change.

    When formulated as they do, you'd think there is some sort of threshold: The ventricles' size only starts changing after about a month. No it seems likely (to me) that the change starts as soon as you go to spa

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