by A new era of human spaceflight is upon us and a crewed flight to the moon, on the Orion spacecraft, is scheduled for next year as part of NASA’s Artemis II mission. This effort will only see astronauts in lunar orbit, but it is expected to pave the way for Artemis III, planned for December 2025, a mission that will send crew members to set foot on the moon.
Artemis III will not only see the first human presence on the lunar surface since 1972, but will allow astronauts to spend seven days near the moon’s south pole. Subsequent Artemis launches will usher in the possibility of even longer periods in space.
So, to ensure that humanity is fully prepared for those longer periods in space, which could eventually include long journeys to Mars — it will only take seven months to travel to the Red Planet — scientists are investigating effects of space on human health. And this includes experiments that focus on the effects of the space environment on sexual health.
On that note, new NASA-funded research suggests that exposure to high levels of galactic cosmic radiation—the space background of highly energetic particles associated with extrasolar events such as supernova explosions—can microgravity of space to damage vascular tissue. Weakening of vascular tissue can also lead to erectile dysfunction, and research has shown that such dysfunction can persist even after astronauts return to Earth and undergo a long recovery period.
“With manned missions to outer space planned for years to come, this work shows that sexual health in astronauts should be closely monitored when they return to Earth,” Justin D. La Favor of Florida State University , co-author of a paper on the findings, said in a statement.
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On Earth, humans are protected from the high-energy charged particles that comprise cosmic radiation because of our planet’s magnetosphere. Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are artificially protected, even though they get as much exposure in a week as a person on the Earth’s surface would in a year.
But, when astronauts spend time on the moon and Mars, they will be much less protected from the particles.
Instead of exposing people to such radiation, and effective “weightlessness” was the other concern, not enough preparation, Favor and the team that did the first study to calculate the effect of Galactic Cosmic radiation and microgravity on erectile dysfunction before space missions to come.
“Although erectile dysfunction affects more than half of men over the age of 40 and represents an important factor for life satisfaction, the consequences of space travel on erectile function are still unclear,” the team wrote in a study about the results.
However, they used 86 adult male Fisher-344 rats as subjects, so these results have yet to be tested in humans. The rats were first exposed to simulated microgravity and simulated galactic cosmic rays in groups at the NASA-operated Space Radiation Laboratory located in New York.
Then, analyzing the tissues of the rats a year later, Favor and his colleagues found that even low exposure to cosmic rays – which can damage cells, proteins and DNA.
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Oxidative stress can contribute to ageing, and may play a role in the development of a range of health conditions, including diabetes, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It is also linked to an increase in the possibility of erectile dysfunction through a coordinated response to vascular tissue damage. Therefore, exposure to cosmic rays through oxidative stress is believed to weaken the function of the arteries that supply blood to erectile tissue. The team also found that microgravity had a similar negative effect on erectile dysfunction, but that effect was less pronounced.
To combat oxidative stress, the human body naturally produces antioxidants, and the team’s research shows that treatment with specific antioxidants may help improve the function of tissues exposed to cosmic rays.
“Although the negative effects of galactic cosmic radiation were long lasting, functional improvements induced by acutely targeting the redox and nitric oxide pathways in tissues suggest that erectile dysfunction may be treatable,” said Favor.
A paper describing these findings was published on November 22 in the journal Federation of American Science for Experimental Biology (FASEB).
