A team of Maltese researchers will be participating in a study on astronaut blood in a bid to better understand the phenomenon of space anaemia and how that knowledge can be used to better treat anaemia patients here on earth. University of Malta researchers, led by Joseph Borg, a professor of biomedical science, in collaboration with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI), will investigate blood samples from crew members of the Polaris Dawn mission, which is set to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida next March. Space travel is known to take a physical toll on the human body and, in fact, all astronauts return to earth suffering from anaemia – a condition of the human body when there are not enough healthy red blood cells in circulation. Red blood cells are responsible for providing oxygen to the body’s tissue. Recent studies authored by Guy Trudel, from OHRI, who is leading the full investigation, found that red blood cell death increased during space flight and microgravity. The research found that while on earth human bodies create and destroy around two million red blood cells per second, astronauts in space experienced a loss of three million red...
↧