TNEMC to study sleep for NASA

A new study at the Tufts-New England Medical Center (TNEMC) has recruited 50 healthy men to be bed-ridden for almost a month in order to study the effects of muscle atrophy and bone deterioration.

The four-year-long study is entirely funded by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) research arm.

NASA will be closely following the results, as humans subjected to the weightless environment of space will experience severe problems related to losing muscle from atrophy. Astronauts who spend a month in space lose up to a third of their bone mass.

The men, aged 30 to 55, will enter a two-week period of intense resistance training and exercise before the experience and will then be kept to their beds over a period of 28 days. Afterwards, they will be studied individually over the course of the four-year study.

The two doctors running the experiment, Drs. Ronenn Roubenoff and Carmen Castaneda-Sceppa, hope that the resistance training and precisely timed feedings will allow the subjects to recover more quickly after their prolonged bed stay.

"Space flight," Roubenoff said, "is essentially prolonged bed rest." He said the information taken from the experiment could prove equally valuable to earth-bound patients as those floating in space.

Women with high-risk pregnancies, invalids, nursing-home patients, and those recovering from surgery all often need to spend prolonged periods in bed. For centuries, bed rest was a standby for medical advice, but studies in the last fifty years have shown conclusively that it is often not advisable.

"If you're healthy, you can tolerate a week without trouble, but after that, you start to see large losses of muscles and bone," Roubenoff said.

"We are built to sacrifice protein from muscle, in times of stress, to boost the immune system," he said. "We're designed to get better relatively quickly or drop dead."

This immune system plunge, combined with continued inactivity, wreaks havoc on the rest of the body. Kidney stones, bed sores, blood clots, and diabetes-causing insulin immunity are common side effects.

The study is expected to prove valuable for a future manned mission to Mars, which President George W. Bush has supported recently. Whereas astronauts reached the moon in three days, it will take at least six months to get to Mars.

"The moon is easy. Mars is a whole different story," Roubenoff said. There is a danger that by the time the astronauts set foot on the surface of Mars, they may not be able to walk or operate their equipment, Roubenoff explained.

Because a possible manned Mars mission is at least a decade away, Roubenoff expects to have years to analyze the study's data. "We'll be mining this data for a long time," he said. "It's a good thing we're not going anytime soon."

Tufts University has other connections to NASA's Mars program. Chemistry Professor Samuel Kounaves is a part of a NASA-funded team that will be launching another Mars rover in 2007.