Space anemia

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-space-causes-us-to-destroy-our-blood/

by feross • 5 years ago

65 44 5 years ago

eps• 5 years ago

Kinda puts 9 months needed to get to Mars into an interesting perspective.

Is there a "fast fix" for treating anemia? Because if humans do get there and land on a surface, this will probably be required.

bena2• 5 years ago

Anemia isn't a disease in and of itself, it's a symptom of something else. You don't treat anemia, you treat what's causing the anemia.

From reading the article, we don't know why it's happening. So we don't know how to treat it yet.

lapetitejort2• 5 years ago

Anemia is just one of a myriad of problems humans would face on a Mars trip. My chief concern, and the one that's probably hardest to tease out, would be the psychological stress. There's no escape pod, no truncated emergency schedule, no one to greet you on the other end, and potentially not enough work to keep you busy. These conditions are hard if not impossible to replicate on earth.

skulk• 5 years ago

If stress is such a problem, then why not just sedate the passenger? Some forms of sedation can be quickly reversed as a last-ditch effort if there's a problem that the computer/mission control absolutely cannot solve.

_tom_• 5 years ago

These conditions are hard if not impossible to replicate on earth

Really? Where have you been for the last two years?

On the other hand, it does fully supports your hypothesis that the psychological stress will be huge.

supperburg2• 5 years ago

It’s not a problem at all. Some people are predisposed to turning psychological stress into a psychiatric pathology but there is nothing intrinsic about stress or space travel that causes psychiatric problems.

People on death row meet your criteria and probably endure more stress and a lot of them don’t develop psychiatric disease.

Tuna-Fish• 5 years ago

Kinda puts 9 months needed to get to Mars into an interesting perspective.

It doesn't take 9 months to go to Mars. It's true that the idealized Hohmann trajectory to Mars takes ~8.6 months, but reality is both a lot more messy and more amenable to optimization.

Just to take this year's launch window as an example:

The absolute lowest launch Δv trajectory is about 390 days, at 3.73km/s. This is obviously unworkable.

However, if you limit yourself to the lower, faster half of the porkchop plot, you'll find that the lowest Δv trajectory is ~200 days, at 4.3km/s.

If you are willing to spend 5km/s, you can bring the trip time down to ~150 days.

And if you have a fully retanked starship in orbit (assumptions: 250t mass at burnout including payload and landing fuel, 1200t tanks, 365s average Isp. These are very conservative, and will probably all be improved upon before any trip to mars is realistic.), which nets you 5615m/s, you can push that down to 130 days.

JamesBarney• 5 years ago

EPO is a medication that increases the number of red blood cells.

DrammBA• 5 years ago

Definitely makes you wonder how dependent the human body is to gravity.

Would be interesting to run these tests on different groups experiencing varying degrees of gravity, on a spinning station perhaps, and see what's the minimum amount of gravity we can get away with while keeping side-effects to a minimum.

Long term tests would also be very valuable, 1-2 years.

chinathrow• 5 years ago

Scott Kelly spent a year on the ISS while his twin brother Mark stayed on the ground for comparison studies.

https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kelly_(astronaut)

bena2• 5 years ago

Gravity is probably the big one as it is the hardest to approximate in space, but we're likely dependent on a lot of stuff that exists on Earth. We evolved to live on Earth. Earth may not be particularly suited for life, but what we consider life may be particularly suited for Earth.

ginko• 5 years ago

I really feel like it's high time we try a rotating wheel space station to see if the artificial gravity fixes problems people develop in zero gravity.

dwohnitmok• 5 years ago

My impression is that a rotating wheel space station, while theoretically well within the grasp of current engineering ability, would be extremely expensive given that we've never done it before.

etatoby• 5 years ago

IIRC a spinning space station would only be beneficial if it was very large and thus far from Earth and expensive.

Otherwise the difference in gravity acting on different sides of the body and more importantly the Coriolis forces would wreak havoc and cause more harm than good.

R0b0t12• 5 years ago

There may be processes that use gravity to either sort proteins or concentrate chemicals. I can't think of much else, besides hormone response to stress caused by gravity.

kortex2• 5 years ago

From what I remember, the lymphatic system is basically open-ended. Blood vessels "leak" interstitial fluid, which flows through the body, collects into lymph vessels, and gets "pumped" by various processes back to the circulatory system.

Everything in chemistry is equilibrium-driven, so I can readily see some process evolving with the assumption of X units of some chemical flowing through this system, and trying to restore homeostasis in space by increasing hemolysis.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Not a doctor but perhaps we can give astronauts some sort of coagulants.

kderbyma• 5 years ago

probably the EM field of the earth causes the blood to polarise in the correct way for iron to work properly

viburnum• 5 years ago

Eventually people will come to realize that humans don't belong in space.

detritus2• 5 years ago

Eventually people will come to realise that humans don't belong above 36°N.

toss1• 5 years ago

If we don't get a handle on climate change, that statement will be that humans don't belong below 36°N (and 36°S)...

dwaltrip• 5 years ago

It’s a science and engineering problem.

supperburg2• 5 years ago

The most controversial opinion of all.

hogrider• 5 years ago

We literally don't but the alternative is dying out here in this planet which is guaranteed to suffer some catastrophe eventually.

pgt• 5 years ago

Aren't blood cells made in our bones? If yes, it seems reasonable to assume that anything which affects bone density would also affect blood cell production, no?

420official2• 5 years ago

The post contends that there's an increase in destruction and not a decrease in production.

delecti• 5 years ago

Things like this amuse me in a way. I'm sure many of us have written code that worked a certain way based on assumptions we didn't realize we were making, or didn't realize could ever be incorrect. Why wouldn't we have evolved with similar "assumptions" based on terrestrial conditions?

And I don't think this is a novel observation on my part, but it does make me feel better when I have to refactor code when my assumptions turn out to be wrong.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Have we run any centrifugal habitat experiments in space on animals to compare? The ISS is just a floating bunch of tubes.

If/when Starship becomes viable, a real space station becomes a real possibility.

As I read once, solar / cosmic ray radiation shielding isn't about thick lead armor, instead an envelope/shield of air/water vapor that is a 100m thick works better. Is that still the thought on practical radiation shielding in space?

westcort• 5 years ago

Blood ultimately comes from your bones. Microtubule stress is known to be important to the hematopoietic process. The microtuble-binding drug plinabulin, for example, binds in such a way that helps ameliorate neutropenia. I would guess that these problems would be solved by artificial gravity. Another factor might be increased levels of background radiation, but I would guess that is already accounted for.

Space anemia

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