Sunday Feature/Curing Diseases—
By Mike Moran, producer, Iowa News Service, bureau of Public News Service.
Kinesiology researchers in Iowa are studying how space travel affects astronaut muscle atrophy and using that knowledge to treat neuromuscular diseases on Earth.
Despite taking measures to counteract atrophy, an astronaut can lose as much as 20% of muscle mass on short spaceflights and as much as 50% on longer missions. Assistant Professor Khaled Kamal in the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Iowa State University said that even after a relatively short time in space, some astronauts report being unable to hold a fork for two weeks.
Kamal’s research studies “extracellular vesicles” for clues — clusters of cellular particles that carry “cargo” to various parts of the body. The work will protect astronauts against spaceflight weakness in the future.
“We need to develop some biomarkers for our astronauts. So this biomarker can predict if the astronaut will go for a disease level or a musculoskeletal level that can affect his mission and can affect the astronaut’s health,” Kamal said.
Kamal’s research is also studying bone density depletion during spaceflight. Kamal said they aim to work with NASA to implement the findings on future missions to the Moon, and eventually Mars.
Kamal said that beyond helping equip future astronauts to stave off spaceflight weakness, the findings are also being used to target debilitating neuromuscular diseases on Earth.
“So we try to understand from spaceflight conditions to translate the knowledge we have from this unique environment to fight some related diseases on Earth – like aging, sarcopenia, or neuromuscular diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy,” Kamal said.
Echoing the words of Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, Kamal’s lab is studying 20 years’ worth of blood samples from 42 astronauts to take “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
