Funding Status:
Active - Currently funded and in progress
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Procurement Mechanism(s):
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Aims:
To provide a repository of data from broad-based biochemistry profiles from blood and urine of astronauts on International Space Station (ISS) missions. These data will allow operational and research assessments to be done, to investigate the time course of changes during and after spaceflight and to characterize individual and subgroup responses to spaceflight in relation to other factors including gender, countermeasures, mission duration, dietary intake, and environmental factors.
The task will contribute to Gap closure by:
N3.1-providing relationship data between diet macronutrient composition, dietary intake, resting energy expenditure, and clinical outcomes (related to exercise, bone, immune, performance, and cardiovascular health)
N3.2-Quantify micronutrient requirements for spaceflight.
N4-Evaluate ongoing Nutritional Status Assessment data collection with each countermeasure tested during flight
N6-Provide risk quantification for the stand alone risk of Osidative Stress and Damage.
N7.1-Identify any significant elements of diet or nutritional status, above and beyond macro and micro requirements from N3.1 and 3.2 that impact measures of musculoskeletal health for follow up in existing or new gaps.
N7.2-Track detailed dietary intake and nutritional status assessment data and relate to cardiovascular health (at the discretion of the Cardiovascular Discipline). Identify any significant elements of diet or nutritional status, above and beyond macro and micro requirements from N3.1 and 3.2, that impact cardiovascular health for follow up in existing or new gaps.
N7.3-Identify the role of one-carbon pathway polymorphisms in VIIP related issues
N7.4-Identify any significant elements of diet or nutritional status, above and beyond macro and micronutrient requirements from N3.1 and 3.2, that impact behavioral health and performance.
N13-Identify renal stone risk profiles related to dietary intake in flight studies
N15-Evaluate ongoing flight experiments for macro or micro nutrients correlated with biomarkers of oxidative damage, and determine if mission architecture affect these relationships.
IM1-Characterize other uninvestigated aspects of immunoregulation, stress, virology and crew incidence.
IM2-characterize the in-flight status of the human immune system. Initial closure will proceed incrementally as described in the metrics for IM-01. And a working group meeting will be held to interpret the necessity of a new/improved standard in the context of the in-flight data.
IM8-Analyze data from studies for impact on immune system.
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.