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posted by martyb on Thursday October 27 2016, @09:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-stay-horizontal-and-wear-tight-spandex dept.

New research brings more bad news to astronauts thinking about long-haul space flights as spinal muscles shrink after months in space, scientists have found.

Floating around in space in an environment with little or no gravity is not good for the human body. Along with decreased bone density, nausea, a puffy face, possible cognitive deterioration, an astronaut's back starts to weaken too.

The research is part of NASA's wider project to study the physical effects space has on the body to prepare for long-haul flights to Mars.

Results from the NASA-funded research have been published in Spine, and show spinal damage persists months after the astronauts return to Earth.

Six NASA crew members were subjected to MRI scans before and after spending four to seven months floating around the microgravity conditions of the International Space Station.

NASA should send the astronauts into space with one of those inversion tables so they can hang upside down.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @10:38PM (#419596)

    The headline finding:

    Paraspinal lean muscle mass, as indicated by the FCSA, decreased from 86% of the total PSM cross-sectional area down to 72%, immediately after the mission. Recovery of 68% of the postflight loss...

    http://journals.lww.com/spinejournal/Documents/NASA-SPINE152831.pdf [lww.com]

    They do not report either way on whether the person estimating these areas was blinded, but they do cite a paper (ref 7 in the current Chang et al article) about how no one has been blinding themselves while doing these types of studies, and worse the researchers usually do not even say whether blinding was done or not, and how this is messing up all the studies and making it impossible to tell what is going on:

    As with all scientific studies, specific methodological safeguards must be followed to minimize bias in study results. A specific methodological criterion that has been reported to be often lacking in the report of imaging studies looking at patients with LBP is blinding.11 Blinding of the outcome assessors is important to ensure the internal validity of a study.12,13 The use of unblinded outcome assessors has been reported, in other research designs, to consistently overestimate the treatment effect as much as 17% to 40%.13–15 Similarly, it has been shown that when diagnostic studies are conducted without adequate blinding of assessors, the diagnostic odds ratio can be overestimated as much as 30%.16

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23504343 [nih.gov]

    So we can see that the current effects are within the variation we would expect due to lack of blinding. This is basic stuff people, why does medical research need to suck so bad? There is no excuse for this, none.

    Finally, this follows another awful piece of research about astronauts dying early published a few months ago: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/01/0234235. [soylentnews.org] Hanlon's razor, I know. But those two pieces of research are so bad I need to think there is some political or financial motivation to keep people from supporting space travel.

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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday October 28 2016, @06:05AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Friday October 28 2016, @06:05AM (#419745)

    How are blind people supposed to accurately assess results? And wouldn't it be cruel to blind them? /s

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:23AM (#419797)

    It looks like they're measuring something physical. When a pre-aligned ruler says 8 inches, does it really matter if the person reading that measurement knows what category they're measuring? Knowing if someone is on a diet or not doesn't change what their scale says. Well, you can press more against the scale to make it go up slightly and do the reverse effect to get it to go down slighly...

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:04PM (#419818)

      In their own reference it says this is an issue. The focus of that paper they cite is on the importance of blinding, it is in the title of the paper. Yet they do not mention blinding! Did they not read their own reference, is this a call for help, or what?

      Besides that, I have done work like this (anatomical tracing). Effects like seen here could easily be due to bias, or even training effects if the person traced the data as it came in, or just in order during one session. If you want to try, there have been a few kaggle competitions lately using fMRI and ultrasound images. Just read the forums about the inconsistent quality of the "ground truth".

      How hard would it have been to have someone relabel all the files and send it to the tracer in random order? Answer: it would take an hour or so. There is no excuse for wasting precious data like this on such shoddy methodology. I am totally unsurprised by the way, I found this problem in a few seconds due to experience with how medical research works. It will continue in this way until people from outside start holding them responsible for producing misinformation. In this case it would probably take a couple days max for them to share the data with an outside team and have them redo it correctly.

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 28 2016, @02:00PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday October 28 2016, @02:00PM (#419837)

    Oh, you're talking about double-blind experiments. Here I thought you were talking about retinal flares [wikipedia.org] for the first half of your post.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @06:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @06:57PM (#419922)

      How would you blind the astronauts as to whether it is before/after they have been in orbit? It makes sense it was not double blind, it is a travesty it was not single blind though.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday October 31 2016, @02:57PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Monday October 31 2016, @02:57PM (#420883)

        Oh, whatever. It's all statistics mumbo-jumbo. You know what I meant :P

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"