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Stimulating Bone Growth In Astronauts
Anonymous Coward writes: "This story will be very interesting for women and space geeks. A State University of New York at Stonybrook researcher has invented a machine that stimulates bone growth in subjects by just having them stand on a vibrating platform. A sheep using the gizmo 20 minutes a day had 20% denser bones after only a year. The idea was to help post-menopausal women, but now it might be used to strengthen astronauts' bones before and during flights. As you know, bones in zero gravity tend to get weaker and more brittle. The weird part is how the device works. Muscle builds by responding to damage, but that's apparently not how bone gets stimulated into growing. It seems that muscle contractions occur within frequencies of 20-50Hz and bones "hear" that oscillation as a message to build up. According to the article, the platform mimics that signal by vibrating undetectably within those frequencies. Cool, huh? Here's the story."
It makes me wonder if this might cause an analogue of "vibration white finger" in some areas of the body. This is a disorder of the circulation, where vibration causes the blood vessels to narrow. It most commonly affects people who use vibrating hand tools for long periods.
What next - Astronaut White Toe Syndrome?
Bone deformation induces a pizeoelectric charge on bone (neg on the compressed side I think) and the micro electric environment induces the osteoblasts to lay down more tissue (bone, cart).
Current bone stimulators for people who have trouble healing fractures rely on this principle (pulsed electric fileds or ultrsonic noise).
The frequency selected by the vibrating platform guy was no accident - it's the same one that the pulsed electric field devices work best.
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Greenstick fractures only occur in kids who almost NEVER have a prob healing bone.
This device and other bone stimulators mostly work by increasing cancellous bone mass.
Structurally, bone has basically 2 components. It has a hard, dense outer shell (cortical) and a spongier inside stuffing (cancellous). The bone density devices mostly work on the inside stuffing part (cancellous bone) and not much on the outer shell (cortical)
Shin splints and stress fractures are a cortical problem (outer shell) and don't respond so well to these devices. Rest/activity modification is still the best way to heal these.
Sorry..
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Oh, you gravity parochial, you. If they can survive in low gravity conditions, why would they need to visit Earth? There's plenty of room and sunlight Out There. And gold, platinum, zinc...
If you sit on the vibrating surface, the vibrations on the thigh bones will hit at 90 degrees of the impact of walking. Maybe that will stimulate your thigh bones to grow to resist the force of sitting, but not of walking. Is that what you want?
It doesn't make your bones *bigger*, just increases their mass by making them *denser*. It doesn't make you taller.
I wasn't a drill sergeant but there was almost always one close at hand :) The lower limb injuries where I served were really bad during the late 80s. After a few official inquiries, we got better footwear but in some cases the damage had been done.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
The only reason you need to "stand" on it is so that it can effectively translate the vibrations into your bones (they could just as easily created a mat that you laid down on). They just need the pressure your weight asserts on the surface of the system. This can be done with big rubber bands (already used for exercise regimens to simulate gravity pulling on the muscles and bones) or just by strapping the system to your body while you're floating around doing other work. If it doesn't translate through the rest of the body that well in zero-g, just strap it to different areas at different times. This could be a great risk/cost reducing research project for long range missions like the space station and Mars/interplanetary missions.
IANAL, but I play one on
Just a thought.
- Jonathan
to gerenrate gravity, the way to do this has been understood for decades if not centuries.
I'm pretty sure it's decades.
Too bad they didn't build the centrifugal force thing into the space station; if I remember correctly, someone asked this question to an official involved in the project. He said it would be too expensive (makes sense), plus they wanted zero gravity for certain experiments (which makes little sense whatsoever, with a spinning station you could change the gravity at will)
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OK, now that we seem to have the bone atrophy thing licked, we have to work on the muscle and heart atrophy. Exercise and possibly those electroshock exercise pads they sell in the back of those magazines should help with the muscles, but afaik the deterioration of the heart is still a concern. The astro/cosmo/nauts work out 4 hours daily in space, and thier heart still weakens in long duration space flights
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Really, this is like observing and mimicking the communication in a distributed system (read: computer network). Only that biology uses (and a computer scientist would say: abuses) so many forms of communication that discoveries like this are still possible even today. It even has some kind of hacker spirit - why use a hormone to tell the bone to grow, when the vibration that's there anyway will do?
-chrisp
"If that makes any sense to you, you have a big problem."
As far as fracture management at university and reports go, bone actually grows according to gravity and muscle pull.
Bone(hydroxyapatite), when compressed, generates a charge. This charge in turn stimulates more bone to grow.
What happens in space is that there is not as much force and so the osteoclasts(or osteoblasts, i can't remember), resorb more bone than is grown.
This is why when a bone is broken it is better to use fracture bracing(orthotics, or casts), and keep the person using the bone, so that the bone is stimulated into healing.
An example of this is the strength difference between internal/external fixation and using fracture bracing.
A brief look at any medical journal, or more specifically, prosthetics/orthotics journals.
I dont know about all this. With vibrating panels and bones and space
It just seems a bit shaky to me!
Lord Arathres
stainless steel
This is a pretty interesting application of technology to solve one of the problems of long-term space travel, but the trouble is that if you're staying for long terms in orbit then there are a whole host of problems which need to be tackled in order to stay fit and able to function again when you come back down to Earth and its one gee of gravity.
The trouble with all of this kind of thing is that whilst it may work it's expensive, time-consuming and often just not effective. If we're going to look towards the future of the race out in the stars, we need to take a more fundamental look at the problem.
The fact is humans aren't designed for space, and we need to change that.
But thankfully we are now coming to and era when we can change our design, and scientists and biotech companies are aggressively moving foward with our understanding of our genetic code. Soon we will be able to manipulate ourselves in order to maximise our potential rather than wasting it on flawed designs. And what better way of using this technology than to prepare ourselves for our glorious leap to space?
We should begin thinking about mass programs of genetic alterations to able us to function better in outer space and under low gravity situations. Things like a more efficient oxygenation system or perhaps even extended our visual range could make a vast difference to our hopes of survival, and by doing it to the germ plasm itself we avoid clunky cybernetic solutions that are unnatural and inefficient.
Whilst I'm sure this idea will be greeted with outrage from people with an emotional attachment to their biological makeup, it makes perfect sense in the long run. And you can bet that if we don't go ahead and do it a culture with less hangups about their physical bodies will do it in order to get ahead. I'd imagine the Chinese would love the idea...
The only downside is the endless paper-TV ads. "How much would expect to pay for this? $500? $1000? Nope - for an incredible $249 the new BoneGro can be yours!"
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
Hmmm... so that means if I strap a subwoofer to my ass my bones will get stronger?
And it explains why rap fans are so hard headed....
Temkin
You'd swear those seats were designed to hold munchkins
Its not just the seats, its everything. You get a tiny meal on a tiny plate which you have to eat with tiny knives and forks. You get drinks in tiny little cups, and Coke from tiny cans.
I can't help but get the feeling that if one ever gets to take a tour of Boeing's engineering department, you'll find hundreds of really small engineers toiling away to build better planes for people, all seemingly unaware that real people are much bigger.
Hmmm... so that means if I strap a subwoofer to my ass my bones will get stronger?
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