After reading the stunning news on alien hijacking a spaceship, I believe you - astronomy fans are all hungry for more fascinating news about our space, right? Well, today, I've just read another astronomy news article from sifynews.com regarding astronauts (2010-05-15). Based on the news article, it is written that spaceflight actually compromises immune system of astronauts! WOW!
According to a new study, spaceflight takes a toll on the genes controlling immune and stress response, which apparently leads to more sickness among astronauts as compared to us - the 'Earthlings'.

These stresses that go with weightlessness actually confined the crew quarters from being away from family and friends and also have a busy work schedule which eventually cause most of them not having sufficient amount of rest, thus resulting in health problems on the immune system.

Here is what a professor said in his views: "Taken together, our results hint at the possibility that an astronaut's immune system might be compromised in space," said immunobiologist Ty Lebsack at the University of Arizona, the lead author of the study.

In order to support their hypothesis, they had actually compared gene-expression patterns in thymuses from four healthy mice that had spent 13 days aboard NASA's STS-118 Endeavour Space Shuttle to those from an equal number of control mice on the ground.

 
After the experiment, they found that 970 individual genes in the thymus of space-flown mice were up or down-regulated by a 1.5 fold change or greater! So, when these changes were averaged, 12 genes in the thymus tissue of all four space-flown mice were significantly up or down-regulated.

"The altered genes we observed were found to primarily affect signaling molecules that play roles in programmed cell death and regulate how the body responds to stress," said Lebsack.


Therefore, these results relate with experiments carried out on the ground to study how microgravity affects immune cells. Well, although astronauts seem to healthy on the news, they had actually suffered quite a lot in terms of their immune system. Perhaps, this news article may seem unrelated to you but I think it is quite important to know about this. So, being an astronaut isn't that easy anymore, right?