Funding Status:
Unfunded - Task not within current budget
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Procurement Mechanism(s):
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Integration/Unique Aspects:
The dataset from the Nutrition SMO has been used by numerous groups to help identify or explain medical, scientific, and even engineering issues that have occurred during or after ISS missions. The data have been used by Medical Operations to confirm the effectiveness of 800-IU/d vitamin D supplementation, to determine whether nutrient toxicities existed (secondary to supplement use), to evaluate renal stone risk in crew members who had experienced renal stones post flight, and to evaluate the effects of exercise device use on bone and calcium metabolism. The ISS Program Office used data from this experiment to determine factors contributing to the Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) failure, and subsequently to make operational decisions for defining forward risk determinations and hardware constraints. Perhaps most strikingly, the data provide evidence that folate-dependent 1-carbon metabolism may be altered in crew members who experienced vision changes post flight. These vision changes have been described as the single biggest clinical issue to arise from space flight to date, and the relationships with 1-carbon metabolism intermediates never would have been discovered if a research surveillance protocol was not being conducted. In this case, data from the Nutrition SMO may guide future countermeasure research and ultimately operational recommendations to minimize risk of vision changes in future crew members. The impact of the data collected to date provide the rationale for continuing this protocol, eliminating some tests while expanding to provide a repository of data to other scientific Disciplines.