Medicine and Space

by Bianka Anszczak

 

With the eccentric front men behind the private space exploration sector often making headline news with their commitment to landing humans on Mars, today, more than ever, the idea of not only travelling but colonising another planet seem less like a fantasy and more like reality.

Mars is the first step in getting people accustomed to even thinking about living on other planets and to eventually colonise someplace else. Of course, it is without question that to achieve this, we still face many challenges. Space is an incredibly hostile environment, with exposure to a range of physical forces, such as, microgravity, extreme temperatures, and radiation, making even a relatively short trip around Mars – roughly 2.5 years – potentially detrimental to a person’s health. This makes inevitable medical implications, particularly if they require operative interventions, one of the most important barriers to get people to the red planet.

Unlike on Earth, gravity – the force that keeps us on the ground and makes things fall – is absent in space, leading to an entire host of problems. One of which is the redistribution of fluids within the body. Without gravity, bodily fluids are distributed evenly throughout the body – on Earth they would travel down to the legs – leading to a decrease in leg size, heart rate and blood pressure as well as facial swelling. Moreover, because of diminished activity, due to the absence of gravity, muscles, bones, and other tissues throughout the body can atrophy. Now although this can be tackled with intensive exercise, astronauts can still lose up to 20% of their overall muscle mass during missions as short as 5 to 11 days. However, this is not the only problem… Radiation in space poses a much higher chance of causing DNA damage and therefore increasing the risk of cancers metastasizing. White blood cells also change in space, decreasing their ability to function effectively. On top of this, it has been found that more stress hormones, glucocorticoids, are produced by the body, further weakening the immune system, and placing humans at a higher risk of contracting pathogens, which just happen to become more lethal and more resistant to antibiotics when in space. And if this wasn’t bad enough, it is also important to note, that stress can negatively affect critical post-surgery recovery and more pathological microbes make the risk of infection after surgery, significantly higher.

In fact, it has been estimated that in a crew of 7, there will be an average of 1 surgical emergency every 2.4 years, with the main causes arising from: trauma, appendicitis, gall bladder inflammation or cancer.

Like on Earth, surgery in space comes with many risks but along with the additional challenges, it becomes even riskier making even ‘simple surgeries’ incredibly difficult and time consuming. To combat this, space medicine researchers have come up with several ideas, from 3D printers and trauma pods to surgical robots and blood-repelling surgical tools, making surgery in space challenging but possible. Yet even then, for a mission to Mars, weight constraints, which will limit the amount of surgical kit carried, and lack of real time communication with experts back on Earth, it goes without saying, there are still many learning curves to overcome.

But with NASA and SpaceX aiming to send the first manned mission to Mars by 2030, we can have faith that these problems will be solved.