Slashdot Mirror
NASA, ASU Team Finds a New Test For Osteoporosis
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has an article about scientists at NASA who believe that they have found a new test that can detect osteoporosis earlier than existing tests. Their test involved having healthy volunteers confined to bed rest for 30 days; 'the technique was able to detect bone loss after as little as one week of bed rest.' Bone loss is an issue for astronauts as well as people affected by osteoporosis. They expect this test will help detect bone loss as a symptom of osteoporosis, but have not yet done a trial to confirm this. This is another point against anyone who claims NASA, and going to space in general, is a complete waste of money."
This is another point against anyone who claims NASA, and going to space in general, is a complete waste of money.
It might prove NASA has some use. But it doesn't sound like going into space was necessary for this research, so that could, in principle, still be a waste.
I'd like to volunteer for a month of bed rest a year.
The problem with bedrest (among the obvious ones of removing the subject from useful tasks for a month) is that it causes a large amount of muscle loss and the very bone loss it is trying to detect. What's more, the bone loss from immobilization is rapid and it may take years to recover from. Alternatively, you may never recover from it fully.
I am a researcher working in the field, and there is a moderate amount of data available from immobilization studies like this (both russian and american) Based on what I know, I'd gladly take a DXA scan over bedrest just based on the risks and accounting for effectiveness, all other factors nonwithstanding.
Even if this method is more effective, ultrasound-based screening methods, which have neither the cost or the radiation dose of an X-ray, are becoming available. As osteoporosis is easy to treat if detected early, in all likelihood this problem will be solved this generation.
If your point of China and India lacking this problem is true, than I would assume the culprit is the lack of exercise as the jobs move from physically demanding things farming etc. to cubicle and assembly line jobs (which of course still is demanding, but in a different sense).
This has always been a totally bogus argument, because you can't do a controlled experiment. Suppose that the US had never engaged in the Cold War propaganda exercise known as the space race. Later, suppose that the US had never gotten into pork-barrel projects such as the space shuttle and the ISS. What would the world have been like? We have no way of figuring out what scientific advances would have been made in this alternate history.
Maybe more tax money would have been directed toward unmanned space exploration, which, unlike human spaceflight, provides scientific results in reasonable proportion to what it costs.
Maybe the nonexistence of a government monopoly on human spaceflight would have encouraged the private sector to start up a space tourism industry decades ago, and my wife and I would have celebrated out 20th anniversary last year in orbit.
Maybe, simply by reducing the size of government, we would have boosted the over-all economy a little bit, and through exponential growth (the "butterfly effect") that small change would have made the economy significantly bigger today, say by 10%. In a 10% bigger economy, a fixed percentage of taxes spent on cancer research means 10% more cancer research, so maybe we'd have a cure for cancer now.
Maybe one smart person, rather than becoming an engineer on the Apollo program, would instead have gone into fundamental research in physics, and we'd have a theory of quantum gravity today.
We just have no way of knowing. You could just as easily say that World War II was a good thing, because without it we would never have invented radar.
Find free books.