Astronauts report headaches on trips to space – 03/15/2024 – Science

Different research has already identified how a microgravity environment can interfere with the functioning of the human body during space missions. A new study just added an item: headaches.

There is a greater likelihood of people having this problem in space, according to work involving 24 astronauts.

The research members are from space agencies in the USA, Europe and Japan and spent up to 26 weeks on the International Space Station (the ISS). The majority, 24, reported having had the symptom.

The proportion was higher than researchers expected based on previous evidence.

The pain occurred not only in the first weeks in space, when the body goes through the process of adapting to microgravity, but also later. In the first case, they often resembled migraines, while in the second they seemed more like a tension headache.

“We hypothesize that different mechanisms are involved in cases of initial headache — within a week or two in space — compared to cases that occurred later,” said neurologist Willebrordus PJ van Oosterhout from the Zaans Medical Center and from the Leiden University Medical Center, in the Netherlands, lead author of the study published last Wednesday (13) in the journal Neurology.

“In the first week, the body needs to adapt to the lack of gravity, which is known as space adaptation syndrome. It is similar to motion sickness and can cause nausea, vomiting, dizziness and headaches,” said Van Oosterhout. “Subsequent headaches can result from an increase in intracranial pressure. Due to microgravity, there is more fluid accumulating in the upper body and head, causing greater pressure in the skull.”

Migraines experienced on Earth are often throbbing, pulsing pains that last 4 to 7 hours, accompanied by symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and hypersensitivity to light and sound, according to the doctor. Tension-type headaches on Earth are generally a pain felt throughout the head without these other symptoms, he added.

The 24 astronauts — 23 men and one woman, with an average age of 47 — were aboard the ISS for missions that took place from November 2011 to June 2018. Of them, 22 reported 378 headache episodes during a total of 3,596 days in orbit. None of the 24 reported headaches in the three months after returning to Earth.

Thirteen astronauts were from NASA, six from the European Space Agency (ESA), two from Jaxa (Japan) and one from the Canadian Space Agency. None of them had been diagnosed with migraines before their space missions, nor did they have a history of recurring headaches.

Among the documented effects of space travel are bone and muscle atrophy, changes in the brain, cardiovascular system and immune system, problems with the balance system in the inner ear and a syndrome involving the eyes. The risk of cancer from increased radiation exposure in space is another concern.

Experts are not sure how big a barrier these effects could pose to human space travel for prolonged periods, such as journeys to Mars.

“The honest answer is that we don’t know the effects of long-duration space travel — possibly years — on the human body,” Van Oosterhout said. “It is clear that even short-term exposure — days or weeks — to medium term — weeks or months — to microgravity already has some effects, most often reversible, on the human body. This is a challenge for space medicine.”