Space Flight Destroys Your Red Blood Cells
JANUARY 19, 2022 BY NANCY ATKINSON
It’s really true: space wants to kill us. And this time, space is trying to kill us from the inside out.
A new study on astronauts living on board the International Space Station shows that while in space, the astronauts’ bodies destroyed 54 percent more red blood cells than they normally would on Earth. Even one year after their flight and back on Earth, the symptoms of “space anemia” persisted in the 14 astronauts tested.
Anemia in astronauts has been known as an issue, even since some of the first human missions to space. Medical experts haven’t been sure, however, about the mechanisms contributing to anemia in space. For quite some time, it was thought that space anemia was part of the fluid shift in astronauts when they arrive in space due to the zero-gravity conditions.
Upon entry into microgravity, body fluids tend to migrate away from the legs toward the upper body and head, with the usual result of nasal congestion, a feeling of fullness in the head and faces that look puffy. This fluid shift has also been part of the studies of why astronauts’ vision degrades while in space.
Previous studies showed that astronauts lose 10 percent of the liquid in their blood vessels while their bodies adapt to being in space. From those studies, it was thought vascular systems in the space environment rapidly destroyed 10 percent of the red blood cells to restore the balance, and that red blood cell control was back to normal after 10 days in space.
More:
https://www.universetoday.com/154096/space-flight-destroys-your-red-blood-cells/
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