For 2 months, 12 people from France can be put right into a “compulsory reclined lifestyle” to review the impacts that microgravity has on astronauts and whether cycling in artificial gravity could combat the negative effects human spaceflight has on the body. The Bedrest with Artificial Gravity and Cycling Exercise (BRACE) is led by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French Space Agency (CNES) and can mark the primary bedrest study involving cycling in Europe.
The project racked up 3,000 expressions of interest from volunteers in France, but after an intensive selection process, 12 people were chosen and are currently gearing up for 60 days in bed, with one shoulder all the time touching the mattress, tilted six degrees below the horizontal line with their feet up, within the name of science.
NSF sat down with Dr. Angelique Van Ombergen, ESA’s lead for all times sciences at human and robotic exploration, to debate what BRACE is and the way it may benefit human spaceflight.
What’s BRACE?
With the variety of human spaceflight missions growing yearly, studying microgravity’s physiological effects on the human body has turn out to be paramount to keeping astronauts healthy in space.
“By putting them within the bed for thus long and by tilting them six degrees downwards, you induce processes within the human body which might be just like what astronauts are showing in space,” Dr. Angelique Van Ombergen said.
🥱 Having trouble getting away from bed today?
🛌 12 volunteers won’t leave the bed for 2 whole months, not even for lavatory breaks, while cycling and spinning on a centrifuge. 🚴♂️🔄
This pioneering bedrest study will help 🧑🚀 and 👴: https://t.co/a4cq2yaUmB
📸 by @Medes_IMPS pic.twitter.com/CtSPKNKdC5
— ESA (@esa) May 27, 2023
The volunteers will take part in one in all three categories: remaining in bed the whole time, remaining in bed aside from half-hour a day of cycling, or remaining in bed aside from half-hour a day of cycling in the bogus gravity centrifuge. All the things from eating meals, toilet breaks, and showers can be done lying down.
Bedrest studies will not be latest but have garnered more attention over the past few years. In truth, in November 2021, NASA awarded Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft-und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Germany $49.9 million to support further bedrest studies.
This latest project follows an identical project conducted in 2019, where ESA, NASA, and Germany accomplished the first-ever bedrest study with artificial gravity to check whether it had an impact on the deterioration of the human body in space. Like BRACE, the previous study placed participants in a spinning artificial gravity centrifuge for half-hour a day to find out whether spinning could countermeasure the negative effects of microgravity. Dr. Van Ombergen said the preliminary results of the project weren’t as helpful as hoped but believes BRACE might produce a greater consequence.
“This BRACE study is essentially a follow-up within the sense that we’re taking a look at a mix of artificial gravity and cycling exercise compared to only cycling, to see whether there may be a supplemental effect of artificial gravity, and to higher understand whether there is usually a potential extra advantage or profit to save lots of [astronauts] from the unwanted changes we see in bedrest that mimic among the physiological changes in spaceflight,” Dr. Van Ombergen said.
Volunteer placed in wall-mounted bike category. (Credit: ESA)
The participants who’ve been assigned to make use of the bicycle without the bogus gravity centrifuge can be taken out of their bed once a day and cycle for half-hour on a wall-mounted device. The participants assigned to the bogus gravity can be taken away from bed to lie down within the centrifuge and cycle for half-hour, while being spun around to drive the blood toward their feet, doubling the force of gravity.
“We encourage volunteers to succeed in their maximum effort on the bike, after which compare the impact with those that will not be biking in any respect,” explains Rebecca Billette, head of clinical research at MEDES, the Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology in Toulouse, France.
The study involves 14 different European scientific teams and is happening on the MEDES Space Clinic in France.
“We’ll compare the impact of a each day exercise routine on a wide range of physiological aspects,” Billette added.
BRACE study begins in France. (Credit: ESA)
Bedrest and Human Spaceflight
Long-term bedrest has been touted as an efficient way of mimicking the body’s response to weightlessness. Several bodily changes during bedrest are similar in space, similar to blood flowing to the top, fluid shifts, and bone and muscle loss. In accordance with NASA, without gravity pulling blood flow to the legs, astronauts’ heads are stuffed with fluids, causing puffy-head bird-legs syndrome.
“We hope to grasp the added value of artificial gravity to the fitness routine astronauts follow on the International Space Station (ISS). The crew exercises two hours per day in orbit. It [artificial gravity] could turn out to be an efficient solution for a healthier body during long-duration space missions, if the technological challenges could be overcome,” said Dr. Van Ombergen.
À lire : Un groupe de 12 volontaires participe actuellement à l’étude d’alitement BRACE à la clinique spatiale @Medes_IMPS, à #Toulouse.
L’étude dure 88 jours dont 60 couché à -6° d’inclinaison, c’est-à-dire avec la tête plus basse que les pieds.
👉 https://t.co/7kAMCqpqj3 pic.twitter.com/fi4bzCcJFd
— ESA France (@ESA_fr) May 23, 2023
The first good thing about performing these bedrest tests on Earth is that there are far fewer costs.
“We’ve got much less constraints and logistics, and we don’t have to take into consideration upload or download or anything like that. We don’t have to take into consideration mass, we are able to test more subjects in a shorter period of time, which after all, in biomedical research is absolutely essential. We are able to test or validate countermeasures that we are able to then later test in space. So, I believe there’s plenty of advantage to doing these grounds studies to tell actual space missions,” Dr. Van Ombergen said.
Nevertheless, although bedrest provides representation of the human body in space, its effectiveness is proscribed.
“After we put subjects on Earth in a bed for thus long, there’s the disuse of their bones and muscles, and that’s why they deteriorate, however the gravity remains to be there,” she said. “Whereas in space, the astronauts are literally quite energetic, but still their muscles and bones deteriorate because there’s no gravity that’s working in against the muscles or impacting their bones metabolism.”
In a 2016 study published by the American Physiological Society called ‘Long-Duration bed rest as an analog to microgravity,’ the authors noted that more of the body’s surface area is compressed in bedrest in comparison with in space.
Volunteer undergoes rigorous testing throughout the 60-day bedrest. (Credit: MEDES)
“In actual microgravity, external compression of all body surface areas is minimal, whereas bed rest generates more compression of tissues over a greater surface area of the body area. This greater compression increases tissue pressures and possibly dehydrates areas of weight bearing due to greater interstitial flow into the microcirculation,” the paper explained.
Despite these caveats, Dr. Van Ombergen said bedrest stays a robust model to validate technology that may benefit human spaceflight.
The Ups and Downs of 60 Days in Bed
The 12 volunteers can be treated as human guinea pigs for 2 months and can be poked and prodded all day long, Dr. Van Ombergen said. ESA and CNES went through a vigorous process to seek out their participants, filtering out those that can have certain neurological, bone, or muscle diseases.
The important criteria for selection were that the volunteers needed to be male, aged between 20 to 45, in good physical shape with a BMI between 20 and 27, and a non-smoker.
Once they start the 60 days, each participant can be placed into their category: cycling, cycling with artificial gravity, or bed rest. While the participants are given detailed details about what they’ll undergo, the category they’re placed in can be completely randomized, which Dr. Van Ombergen said could be psychologically difficult.
Artificial gravity centrifuge at DLR in 2019 study. (Credit: DLR)
The participants will follow a really standardized routine, Dr. Van Ombergen said. “They can be woken up daily at the identical time. They are going to take their meals at the identical time. Their meals can be very standardized, [and] they can be measured by way of the nutrients which might be in there. They should eat a selected portion of that food to be certain they get enough nutrients,” she said.
Even once they finish their food, the teams will calculate what’s left on the plate to research essentially the most accurate representation of what went into their body, which is able to impact their results.
Apart from the half-hour of exercise for the 2 groups, their days can be stuffed with undergoing tests, similar to muscle biopsies, urine samples, scans to ascertain body composition, data collection to ascertain blood pressure, heart rate, nutrient absorption, energy expenditure, bone mass, and mood.
The participants will get their very own time, but Dr. Van Ombergen asserts that it’ll be difficult. Participants are encouraged to set goals, similar to learning a brand new language or taking a category online, to assist with boredom.
Volunteer placed in bedrest tilted six degrees to mimic the sensation of weightlessness. (Credit: DLR)
“From a physical perspective, you’re deteriorating to a certain extent by lying in bed for thus long and you would possibly get some nuisance or some things which might be uncomfortable, perhaps even some pain. At the identical time, you’re being asked to take part in all of the investigations, which sometimes are quite invasive or is likely to be somewhat bit painful,” Dr. Van Ombergen says.
In early 2024, ESA and CNES will conduct a second a part of the identical study with one other 12 participants. The agencies will then have a complete of 24 people to research. The subsequent project can be one other 60-day study in Slovenia specializing in the mix of vibration exercise and artificial gravity, ESA explained.
After 60 days, the participants will undergo 14 days of post-bedrest recovery and monitoring. The study began on April 4 and can end in Early July.
