In April 2002, South African computer entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth paid about $20 million for a round-trip flight to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Shuttleworth underwent a year of training and preparation before the space flight. (NASA)

A group of former NASA executives plans to offer excursions to the moon to anyone who can afford the   $1.4-million-dollar-per-couple ticket price.

Golden Spike Co. is the latest private company to join the burgeoning space tourism industry.

Once operations launch, the public demand for seats on commercial spacecraft is expected to grow from 373 seats in the first year, to 533 seats in the 10th year, for a ten-year total of 4,518 seats, according to the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Aside from money, health might be a factor in deciding whether or not to take a space vacation. Professional astronauts go through rigorous testing and conditioning before jetting into space.

A study in the British Medical Journal suggests the medical community should establish a set of health screening standards for potential space tourists to determine whether they can withstand the rigors of space travel.

At the moment, there is no standard outlining how medical professionals should advise patients about the health implications of space travel.

NASA’s selection process for picking the first American astronauts included extensive physical and psychological testing. Here, Mercury astronaut Walter Schirra’s lung capacity is tested. (NASA)

“We all have questions from patients related to air travel,” said the study’s lead author Dr. S. Marlene Grenon from the University of California, San Francisco. “In the short future, we may be getting questions from our patients about space travel.”

Medical doctors and other scientists have researched the impact of space travel on the human body ever since the space race between the USA and the former USSR began in 1957.  A half-century later, scientists have found space travel does profoundly affect humans, both physically and mentally.

“In a zero-gravity outer-space environment, humans go through very unique physiological changes,” said Grenon. “They experience bone loss, muscle atrophy, increased risk of certain heart problems, a decrease in immune function, kidney stones and motion sickness. These significant changes in the body and how it functions need to be considered.”

Space health guidelines could also help doctors treat those who might suffer the ill effects of space travel while in flight.

So far, commercial space tourism has served only a few passengers and they’ve all gone through the rigorous screening and training given to professional astronauts.

“The changes that occur in zero gravity happen for several reasons,” Grenon said. “This includes volume redistribution towards the chest and head, decrease use of the lower extremities, and the lack of gravitational stimuli on the cells.”

Virgin Galactic has scheduled its first space tourism flight, which will ferry citizen astronauts who pay  $200,000 per ticket. (Virgin Galactic)

The study’s senior author Millie Hughes-Fulford, also from UCSF, knows a bit about the impact of space flight on the human body. She was the first woman to travel into space as a working scientist on board the shuttle Columbia in 1991.

“It feels like you’re on top of a roller coaster while you’re in outer space. That feeling, in the pit of your stomach, is what you’ll experience the entire time,” said Hughes-Fulford. “You must check with your doctor to see if your heart and other vital organs are up for this type of adventure.”

Grenon said a new field of medicine could open up as a result of the expected rapid growth of the space tourism industry.

“In the future, I think we can expect space medicine doctors will be needed specifically for the commercial space sector as demand increases,” she said. “And these experts would likely link with specialists on Earth in different fields such as cardiology, vascular surgery or neurology when it comes to specific questions on a condition in space or recommendations on how to best manage a medical problem prior to a flight.”

Indian researchers have developed a pain-free cholesterol test that uses digital cameras instead of needles. (Photo: Andrew Ferguson via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Checking your cholesterol could soon be as simple as snapping a picture of your hand.

Folks with an aversion to needles will welcome news that researchers in India have developed a cholesterol test which uses a digital camera instead of needles.

N.R. Shanker and his colleagues from the Sree Sastha Institute of Engineering and Technology write about their new, non-invasive  cholesterol test in a recent edition of the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics.

A snap shot of the back of a patient’s hand, taken with a digital or mobile phone camera, is cropped to focus on the finger creases  where  cholesterol tends to be concentrated and can be detected by the camera, according to researchers.

Using a special image processing computer program they developed, researchers compare the patient’s hand image to thousands of similar pictures  contained within a large database.

The database images represent varying degrees of cholesterol levels and each image is linked to a measurement that had been taken with a standard cholesterol blood test.

Indian researchers say the creases between fingers on the back of the hand can indicate a person’s cholesterol levels. (Photo: David DeHetre via Flickr/Creative Commons)

If the non-invasive test shows  a patient has a higher-than-normal total cholesterol level,  a more extensive cholesterol blood test is administered to determine the specific levels of good (HDL) vs. bad (LDL) cholesterol in the patient’s blood stream.

Cholesterol is a waxy, fat-like substance  the body produces to help keep it healthy.  According to the National Institutes of Health, cholesterol makes hormones, vitamin D and substances that help digest food.

Our bodies produce two types of cholesterol, LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol and HDL (high-density lipoprotein).

Too much bad cholesterol can build up as plaque – a thick, hard deposit the artery walls.  Continued buildup of this plaque can develop into a condition called arteriosclerosis, or narrowing of the arteries, putting a person at risk of heart disease, stroke or heart attack.

Good cholesterol, according to the American Heart Association, is thought to protect against heart attack.

Some researchers even believe that HDL can remove excess cholesterol from arterial plaque, slowing down its buildup on the walls of your arteries.

High levels of LDL cholesterol can be caused eating a diet that’s high in saturated fats or it could be genetic in nature passed along within a family from generation to generation.

High LDL cholesterol levels lead to plaque build up on artery walls (Image: CDC)

Your bad cholesterol levels can also increase if you live a sedentary lifestyle.

Exercise can cause LDL levels to drop while levels of  good (HDL) cholesterol rise.

So if you find that you have an elevated level of LDL cholesterol, bringing it back down to normal may be as easy as eating a healthy diet and getting some exercise.

Patient getting emergency room treatment for cardiac emergency (Photo: US Navy via Wikimedia Commons)

Heart failure is one of the most common causes of hospitalization and is among the most expensive chronic diseases to treat.  When a patient comes in to the emergency room complaining about having difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, fatigue, or chest tightness, the health care professionals must decide then and there if the patient is at a high or low short-term risk of dying within the next seven days.

Admission to the hospital is often required for patients who were determined to have a high or intermediate-risk.  But, for those who were considered to be low-risk patients, the doctors may just send them home after receiving some medical care at the emergency room.

If a bedside clinical assessment of a heart failure patient isn’t clearly apparent, this could lead to an uncertain prognosis which may cause the doctor to either overestimate or underestimate the risk of death.  This results in some very low-risk patients being hospitalized when they could have been sent home or, conversely, with very high-risk patients who were thought to be safe for discharge being sent home where they soon die.

(Photo: KOMU Photos/Eric Staszczak via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Determining whether a heart failure patient is high or low risk is often very challenging, even for the best physicians.  But now, a new web based computer algorithm developed in Canada may help doctors make better decisions on whether the patient stays or is sent back home.

“Doctors estimate the risk of heart failure patients in the emergency department based on best clinical judgment which may include different factors depending on their prior experience,” says Dr. Douglas Lee, a cardiologist at Toronto’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre, scientist at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Lee led a team of doctors and scientists to develop the “Emergency Heart Failure Mortality Risk Grade” or EHMRG.  It’s a risk model or algorithm that uses 10 simple predictors such as blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of troponin (an enzyme that’s normally only found in the heart) all of which can indicate potential heart trouble.

Dr. Douglas Lee led team to develop 'Emergency Heart Failure Mortality Risk Grade' or EHMRG. (Photo: Peter Munk Cardiac Centre)

After entering all of the required medical information into the program, available on the web, the program performs calculations and produces an individual probability report on whether that patient could die within the week.

Along with the web-based application Dr. Lee and his team is also developing a version of this program for the smartphone.  Dr. Lee’s goal with this system is to collect data from individual physicians and hospitals that would be used to make comparative studies that would improve the quality of care and also help doctors and hospitals become more cost efficient.

Dr. Lee invites any physician who may be reading this to try their new system. It’s available on the web. The address is ccort.ca.

On this week’s radio edition of “Science World” Dr. Lee joins us to talk about this new system and the countless number of lives it could save every year.  Check out the right column for scheduled air-times or listen to the interview with Dr. Lee below.

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Other stories we cover on the “Science World” radio program this week include:

• NASA getting set to launch black hole hunter
• UN report warns that Earth faces irreversible damage
• Researchers have linked skin cancer with childhood stress
• Scientists find 3.4 million year-old pre-human fossilized foot
• Skywatchers witness once in a lifetime astronomical event
• Wildlife officials take unusual steps to stop invasive species of fish