Space travel is certainly not for the faint of heart, for many reasons including its effects on physical health. It can potentially disturb human immune systems and increase red blood cell death. Astronauts can even suffer from bone loss during missions. It could also increase headaches. Astronauts with no prior history of headaches may experience migraine and tension-type headaches during long-haul space flights–over 10 days in space. The findings are detailed in a study published March 13 in the journal Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
“Changes in gravity caused by space flight affect the function of many parts of the body, including the brain,” W. P. J. van Oosterhout, study co-author and a neurologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said in a statement. “The vestibular system, which affects balance and posture, has to adapt to the conflict between the signals it is expecting to receive and the actual signals it receives in the absence of normal gravity.”
[Related: 5 space robots that could heal human bodies—or even grow new ones.]
The study looked at 24 astronauts from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). All of the astronauts were assigned to International Space Station expeditions for up to 26 weeks from November 2011 to June 2018. Combined, the astronauts studied spent a total of 3,596 days in space.
The astronauts all completed health screenings and a questionnaire about individual headache history before their space flight flight. Nine of them reported never having any headaches prior to the study, with three reporting a headache that interfered with their daily activities within the last year. None of the astronauts had a history of recurrent headaches or had a migraine diagnosis.
During space flight, they filled out a daily questionnaire for the first seven days and a weekly questionnaire each…
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