neurosurgery and space travel!
Dec. 5th, 2018 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shroom_boi there are a bunch of guest speakers at uni today to showcase the nuances of the medical field, and so far the two lectures i went to were super interesting!
the first one was a neurosurgery lecture accompanied by videos from actual neurosurgical procedures - one about an aneurysm, the other one about a hydrocephalus in an adult. once again it was really fascinating to see how malleable the brain is, and how much of very little damage you can do without any kind of losses of function.
the hydrocephalus one was a little bit less interesting since the actual brain was even less involved, but there it was also very interesting to see the methods they use to make the procedure as easy as possible, ie with an endoscope. even though apparently that procedure is significantly more complicated than it needs to be, simply because there isn't enough profit to make the medical industry actually invent better equipment, which would be sufficiently possible. fucked up, but what can you do?
it's also very funny to me how neurosurgery is so often hailed as so absolutely incredibly out of this world, but the brain is really just any other organ, and it's adaptable enough, both physically and physiologically, to deal with humans poking around in it without any problems.
they used titanium clips of i think 6 and 4 mm to clip off the aneurysm, and then i was extremely surprised to see that they just left them in! maybe i should've expected that, since if they take them out then the aneurysm would just pop up again, but... still, it's wild. also they looked a lot bigger all the time because the operation is done completely through a microscope? and that microscope has a sort of x-ray vision??? (i know it's not x-rays, really, but i forgot the actual word) but... yeah, that's pretty cool. also hard on the eyes probably :D
the second lecture i attended was by a speaker from the DLR, the german centre for air- and space travel (yes that is absolutely the correct translation and not at all made up by me) (not to be confused with ESA, the european space agency), and he talked about some tests and studies they're doing at the envihab, a super specialised lab near cologne. ofc they have a metric fuckton of super amazing equipment, including a human centrifuge and a pet-mrt, a chamber where they can completely fuck with pressure and air.
the lecturer works in cardiovascular research, and he presented a whole bunch of recent studies they made, including a bedrest one (to study the effects of zero-g on the human body, bc if you're on complete bedrest with your head at -6°, apparently that comes super close to the physiological condition in zero-g. and you stay like that for 30 days, and next year there's a study for doing that for 60 days. yikes :D), and also one where they studied the effects of hypoxia (less o2 in the air) (they had two (very healthy) people live in 8,5% oxygen for two weeks. they were expert mountaineers, so they were somewhat used to having to compensate for +/- 12% of oxygen, but it still must've been hard).
the most interesting thing was that in all studies, the subjects would show indicators that are usually associated with very bad health, but they had absolutely no symptoms, and after being readjusted to normal living conditions, the indicators vanished.
the hypoxia study was less geared towards space travel though, but rather a follow-up on a study that had been done with mice, where they induced a heart attack and then showed that mice who recovered under hypoxic conditions as opposed to normal ones showed greater rates of recovery, and in a lot of cases their hearts even got stronger!
originally, the people at envihab wanted to research that in regards to humans with another mountaineer who had suffered a heart attack while climbing the mount everest without o2, but that guy's cardiologists said no. understandably, but of course a setback for the study.
it was also really fascinating to hear about what currently our main issues are that prevent us from actually sending humans to mars etc (apart from the amount of time it'd take etc). radiation is a VERY big topic there, because astronauts on the iss are already experiencing about 100 times the amount of radiation on earth, and moving completely past the van allen belt, which protects earth from the really evil space radiation would increase that to about 300 times, which would of course be lethal on a journey that's as long as the trip to mars. and since every kg of stuff they send up into space costs around 15k us dollars... well, lead shielding would be a bit difficult under those circumstances.
although there are projects in place that want to test shielding with water, or organics, those are apparently still all very much in the development phase.
another issue is viip, the vision impairment due to intercranial pressure, which makes astronauts come back with worse sight than before. although women are less affected than men! nobody knows why though... yet.
and of course there are all the psychosocial factors that such a long journey in a tincan would bring. so... yeah, it'll be quite some time unfortunately before we can all join starfleet :(
i have another lecture this afternoon, about neurological plasticity, which is yet another VERY interesting topic, and i have high hopes for that!
the first one was a neurosurgery lecture accompanied by videos from actual neurosurgical procedures - one about an aneurysm, the other one about a hydrocephalus in an adult. once again it was really fascinating to see how malleable the brain is, and how much of very little damage you can do without any kind of losses of function.
the hydrocephalus one was a little bit less interesting since the actual brain was even less involved, but there it was also very interesting to see the methods they use to make the procedure as easy as possible, ie with an endoscope. even though apparently that procedure is significantly more complicated than it needs to be, simply because there isn't enough profit to make the medical industry actually invent better equipment, which would be sufficiently possible. fucked up, but what can you do?
it's also very funny to me how neurosurgery is so often hailed as so absolutely incredibly out of this world, but the brain is really just any other organ, and it's adaptable enough, both physically and physiologically, to deal with humans poking around in it without any problems.
they used titanium clips of i think 6 and 4 mm to clip off the aneurysm, and then i was extremely surprised to see that they just left them in! maybe i should've expected that, since if they take them out then the aneurysm would just pop up again, but... still, it's wild. also they looked a lot bigger all the time because the operation is done completely through a microscope? and that microscope has a sort of x-ray vision??? (i know it's not x-rays, really, but i forgot the actual word) but... yeah, that's pretty cool. also hard on the eyes probably :D
the second lecture i attended was by a speaker from the DLR, the german centre for air- and space travel (yes that is absolutely the correct translation and not at all made up by me) (not to be confused with ESA, the european space agency), and he talked about some tests and studies they're doing at the envihab, a super specialised lab near cologne. ofc they have a metric fuckton of super amazing equipment, including a human centrifuge and a pet-mrt, a chamber where they can completely fuck with pressure and air.
the lecturer works in cardiovascular research, and he presented a whole bunch of recent studies they made, including a bedrest one (to study the effects of zero-g on the human body, bc if you're on complete bedrest with your head at -6°, apparently that comes super close to the physiological condition in zero-g. and you stay like that for 30 days, and next year there's a study for doing that for 60 days. yikes :D), and also one where they studied the effects of hypoxia (less o2 in the air) (they had two (very healthy) people live in 8,5% oxygen for two weeks. they were expert mountaineers, so they were somewhat used to having to compensate for +/- 12% of oxygen, but it still must've been hard).
the most interesting thing was that in all studies, the subjects would show indicators that are usually associated with very bad health, but they had absolutely no symptoms, and after being readjusted to normal living conditions, the indicators vanished.
the hypoxia study was less geared towards space travel though, but rather a follow-up on a study that had been done with mice, where they induced a heart attack and then showed that mice who recovered under hypoxic conditions as opposed to normal ones showed greater rates of recovery, and in a lot of cases their hearts even got stronger!
originally, the people at envihab wanted to research that in regards to humans with another mountaineer who had suffered a heart attack while climbing the mount everest without o2, but that guy's cardiologists said no. understandably, but of course a setback for the study.
it was also really fascinating to hear about what currently our main issues are that prevent us from actually sending humans to mars etc (apart from the amount of time it'd take etc). radiation is a VERY big topic there, because astronauts on the iss are already experiencing about 100 times the amount of radiation on earth, and moving completely past the van allen belt, which protects earth from the really evil space radiation would increase that to about 300 times, which would of course be lethal on a journey that's as long as the trip to mars. and since every kg of stuff they send up into space costs around 15k us dollars... well, lead shielding would be a bit difficult under those circumstances.
although there are projects in place that want to test shielding with water, or organics, those are apparently still all very much in the development phase.
another issue is viip, the vision impairment due to intercranial pressure, which makes astronauts come back with worse sight than before. although women are less affected than men! nobody knows why though... yet.
and of course there are all the psychosocial factors that such a long journey in a tincan would bring. so... yeah, it'll be quite some time unfortunately before we can all join starfleet :(
i have another lecture this afternoon, about neurological plasticity, which is yet another VERY interesting topic, and i have high hopes for that!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 11:41 pm (UTC)