Abstract
Escalating government and commercial efforts to plan and deploy viable manned near-to-deep solar system exploration and habitation over the coming decades now drives next-generation space medicine innovations. The application of cutting-edge precision medicine, such as brain stimulation techniques, provides powerful clinical and field/flight situation methods to selectively control vagal tone and neuroendocrine-modulated corticolimbic plasticity, which is affected by prolonged cosmic radiation exposure, social isolation or crowding, and weightlessness in constricted operational non-terran locales. Earth-based clinical research demonstrates that brain stimulation approaches may be combined with novel psychotherapeutic integrated memory structure rationales for the corrective reconsolidation of arousing or emotional experiences, autobiographical memories, semantic schema, and other cognitive structures to enhance neuropsychiatric patient outcomes. Such smart cotherapies or countermeasures, which exploit natural, pharmaceutical, and minimally invasive neuroprosthesis-driven nervous system activity, may optimize the cognitive-emotional restructuring of astronauts suffering from space-related neuropsychiatric disease and injury, including mood, affect, and anxiety symptoms of any potential severity and pathophysiology. An appreciation of improved neuropsychiatric healthcare through the merging of new or rediscovered smart theragnostic medical technologies, capable of rendering personalized neuroplasticity training and managed psychotherapeutic treatment protocols, will reveal deeper insights into the illness states experienced by astronauts. Future work in this area should emphasize the ethical role of telemedicine and/or digital clinicians to advance the (semi)autonomous, technology-assisted medical prophylaxis, diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, and compliance of astronauts for elevated health, safety, and performance in remote extreme space and extraterrestrial environments.
Highlights
Spaceflight-engaged astronauts must often perform with sustained high physical, mental, emotional, and social proficiency to satisfactorily begin and complete even routine daily mission duties and habitation needs in non-terrestrial environments
Space Administration (NASA) Technology Taxonomy roadmap continues to underscore the need for research and development into, and the application of, technologies and methods that improve human health, life support, and habitation in space and extraterrestrial environments in furtherance of National Aeronautics andSpace Administration (NASA)’s goals for manned near-to-deep solar system exploration
As with findings from the hippocampus, these results indicate biomechanisms that underlie the possible successful treatment of astronaut neuropsychiatric conditions with integrated memory structure rationales and vagus nerve stimulation (VNS)
Summary
Spaceflight-engaged astronauts must often perform with sustained high physical, mental, emotional, and social proficiency to satisfactorily begin and complete even routine daily mission duties and habitation needs in non-terrestrial environments. The modification of these structures, comprising (implicit/explicit) emotional responses, autobiographical memories, semantic schema, and other cognitive structures, will help clinicians better understand and treat mood, affect, and anxiety disorders, as well as consequences from traumatic brain injury Some of these programs, which may render good prevention, intervention, and postvention techniques for astronaut mental health, aim to apply the Yerkes-Dodson law of arousalmodulated performance within (mental/physical) situational contexts to (1) recover or uncover patient memories of emotional traumas, and (2) to associate and reconsolidate corrective cognitive representations and emotional responses with the same target memories through appropriate use of a single psychotherapeutic modality or various. Medical governing bodies must establish best policies and practice guidelines for the ethical design and use of these technological systems on Earth and beyond
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