Scientists from NASA summed up the first results of the experiment, which consisted of observing the health of Scott Kelly, who lived on board the ISS for more than a year, and his brother Mark Kelly, who lived at that time in similar conditions on Earth.
“Scott Kelly's telomeres have begun to lengthen in space, which may be due to lower food intake and increased levels of physical activity aboard the ISS. But when he returned to Earth, telomeres began to shrink again. Interestingly, in November, both Scott's and Mark's telomeres suddenly decreased significantly, which may be due to some alarming event in their family life,”NASA officials said.
Recall that telomeres are the end sections of chromosomes that protect them from breakage, and throughout a person's life they are gradually shortened. Reduction of telomeres to a certain critical point puts the cell in the "old age mode", completely excluding it from the body.
In other words, we can say that life in space for some unknown reason leads to the fact that the process of cellular aging either completely stops, or even reverses.
Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly, as NASA researchers said, participated in an interesting experiment in which doctors of the American space agency tried to evaluate how life in orbit can affect human health.
Scott and Mark are identical twins and their life usually proceeded in a similar way - both of them are astronauts, which allowed scientists to solve this problem in the most rigorous way.
Taking samples of blood and other tissues before and after a year's "business trip" to the ISS, NASA doctors compared them and highlighted several other interesting changes, in addition to lengthening telomeres, which caused life in space.
For example, a long life in space, as scientists previously assumed, leads to a slowdown in the rate of bone formation, and also causes small negative changes in memory. Both the one and the other negative factor, as emphasized in NASA, were not large enough to cause serious problems for human health when traveling to the Moon or Mars.
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Another interesting observation was the discovery that life in space can increase inflammation, increasing the level of fats and hormones in the body, and the composition of the microflora in Scott Kelly's intestines changed significantly during his life in orbit. After he returned to Earth, both returned to normal.
Even more interesting, identical twins were not completely identical from a genetic point of view - the deciphering of their RNA and DNA showed that over 200 thousand signal RNAs that regulate the work of various genes were contained in Scott's and Mark's cells in different quantities. These differences, as scientists note, could be caused both by newly acquired mutations and by the very fact of a person entering space. What caused these differences, biologists plan to find out during the subsequent analysis of samples.
According to NASA, the final report on the health of the Kelly twins will be published in the second half of the year in a prestigious scientific journal.
These data and publications, the researchers hope, will help NASA and scientists across our planet as a whole prepare for a trip to Mars and other planets.
