Spaceflight is a risky business. Keeping astronauts healthy, especially their hearts, has driven Benjamin Levine’s career as a top consulting cardiologist to NASA. Now that a Mars mission is on the horizon, his most recent research continues to test how well exercise maintains the heart’s structure and function during prolonged spaceflight.
In their paper published Tuesday in Circulation, an international team reports results from 13 astronauts who performed onboard echocardiograms during their six months in space. That imaging showed mild but transient changes in the heart when moving from Earth gravity to microgravity, revealing how long-duration spaceflight affects cardiac size and function, and what happens when landing on Earth and in simulations of Martian gravity.
