Elizabeth Wagner of NASA Glenn Research Center’s outreach office helped set up the briefing. She can be reached at elizabeth.b.wgner@nasa.gov.
By Eileen Beal, M.A., and Carrie Buchanan, Ph.D.
You might know about the culinary delights – everything from Tang to freeze-dried ice cream – the space program has added to the American lifestyle. But NASA’s Glenn Research Center, just outside Cleveland, has been making significant contributions to health care innovation and medical device development since 1977.
Astronauts’ experiences in space have led to medical innovation, ranging from cataract detectors to a special harness – specifically designed with the anatomical needs of women in mind – used for treadmill workouts in the zero gravity of space.
Jerry Myers Jr., Ph.D., chief of the bioscience and technology branch at the Glenn Research Center, explained many of these devices and innovations journalists on May 22, at an event hosted by the Association of Health Care Journalists’ new Cleveland-area chapter. The Cleveland chapter of SPJ co-sponsored the event.
The technology transfer from space-focused to Earth-based medicine resulted from extensive and long-term collaboration between NASA and other institutions, many of which are located in the Cleveland-Akron Area, Myers said.
“We’re collaborating with everybody we can possibly collaborate with, because we would be nowhere without the local community,” he told the group.
It’s not just Cleveland-Akron area health care institutions (including Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals Case Medical Center and the MetroHealth Medical Center, the county’s safety-net hospital) that are collaborating with and benefit ting from joining forces with NASA. Students from several Northeast Ohio Universities have been working with “mentors” at NASA’s Glenn Research Center to develop and design new materials, devices and procedures.
Astronauts are susceptible to 87 in-flight medical issues that must be prepared for, Myers told journalists, and research on these conditions has been extensive. They include well-known issues such as loss of bone mass – which doesn’t just weaken bones, it also makes astronauts more susceptible to kidney stones on their return to Earth because of excess calcium in the bloodstream – as well as things like “space adaptation sickness,” the ultimate form of travel sickness.
Eye problems are a major focus of past and current research at NASA Glenn because astronauts often have trouble with their eyes. There can be serious problems if they actually get something in their eyes while in space because, Myers said, “it’s terribly difficult to remove foreign objects from the eyes in zero gravity.”
Astronauts also can end up with longer-term vision problems, including a condition known as papilledema. The inverse of glaucoma, it results from intracranial pressure.
The simplest medical procedures can also become enormously complex in zero gravity, Myers explained. Imagine trying to do a simple injection in outer space, where the substance being injected can be in solid, liquid and gaseous form, all coexisting in the syringe at something called the “triple point.” This challenge led to the development of special syringes that are proving useful for other applications as well, Myers said.
Another innovation that’s making waves is a “reusable blood analyzer” that can do hundreds of blood tests from a single drop of blood, thanks to the miracle of fluorescence.
Myers bemoaned the fact that the list of potential innovations is so lengthy that NASA engineers are challenged to find enough time to investigate their many possible applications. Hence, he stressed, the extensive collaboration the Glenn Research Center does with community institutions.
