WEDNESDAY, Sept. 25, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Long-term space travel to Mars could be bad for astronauts’ hearts, a new zero-gravity study shows. After a month at the International Space Station, a set of 48 bioengineered human heart tissue samples beat about half as strong as similar tissues that remained on Earth.
The tissues also became weaker and started showing genetic evidence of inflammation and oxidative damage that are hallmarks of heart disease , researchers reported Sept. 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . “Many of these markers of oxidative damage and inflammation are consistently demonstrated in post-flight checks of astronauts,” added researcher Devin Mair , a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore.
Previous studies have shown that some astronauts return to Earth with reduced heart muscle function and irregular heartbeats, researchers said. Some, but not all, of these effects dissipate over time following their return. Missions to Mars could mean as much as two years spent in space, making it crucial that doctors better understand the effects of weightlessness on heart function, researchers said.
For the study, researchers used stem cells to create a set of heart muscle cells, called cardiomyocytes. The team then placed the heart muscle tissues into a chip that strings the tissues between two posts, to collect data about how the tissues beat. The resulting chambers were about half the size of a cell phone.
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