Astronauts may be taking one small step for man, but they’re risking their bone wellness whilst doing it. Due to the weightlessness and microgravity in space, the wellbeing of astronauts is at risk to bone loss, and this has led NASA scientists to develop an important new test for the detection of osteoporosis bone loss.
Osteoporosis bone loss can go undetected for years and often is only diagnosed with scans when the weakening of your bones has led to a fracture. However, NASA scientists believe they have found a way to spot osteoporosis bone loss at the earliest disease stages, by using a test that looks for traces of bone calcium in the urine.
The technique was developed by scientists at Arizona State University working with the US space agency, and is published in PNAS journal. It involves analysing calcium isotopes, which are different atoms of the element calcium. Calcium isotopes are derived from bone, and each come with their own specific number of neutrons. When your bone is destroyed and formed, there is a change in the balance or abundance of these different which means they indicate early changes in bone density.
To test the method, the scientists confined 12 healthy volunteers to bed rest for 30 days, because prolonged bed rest triggers bone loss. They then used the technique to look for signs of bone loss, and managed to detect it in as little a time as one week of bed rest. This is a far shorter time than it would take conventional medical scans, such as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), to detect changes in bone density. The technique was also able to give a direct measure of net bone loss, which other biochemical tests for bone loss, that look for blood markers of increased bone turnover, are unable to do.
According to lead researcher Professor Ariel Anbar, ‘The next step is to see if it works as expected in patients with bone-altering diseases. That would open the door to clinical applications.’ There are also expectations that the technique could help to monitor other diseases that affect the bones, including cancer.
NASA nutritionist Scott Smith explained, ‘NASA conducted these studies because astronauts in microgravity experience skeletal unloading and suffer bone loss. It’s one of the major problems in human spaceflight, and we need to find better ways to monitor and counteract it.’
The results were praised by Dr Nicola Peel of the National Osteoporosis Society in the UK, who said, ‘It is always exciting to see new techniques being developed with the potential to increase our understanding of the evolution and mechanism of bone disease. This approach of using calcium isotopes is very interesting and appears to have potential to detect very early changes of bone loss. This could therefore have a future role in the clinical evaluation of patients.’
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