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“Most medications were considered partially effective,” they wrote. Sleep was the most common reason for taking a drug, but mild painkillers like ibuprofen were also frequently swallowed. Medication use, on average, was somewhat more than on Earth, Wotring and Smith found. “I was completely blown away when we saw how much data were coming in.” The results were published in the journal Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance this past January. “We were expecting more data,” Wotring said. Wotring and her co-author LaRona Smith, a clinic administrator at Johnson Space Center, collected 5766 records of medication use-around 38 times more than the records from all previous space flights combined.

Every time they took a pill, the astronaut would record the drug name, the dose, the indication for taking the medicine, and whether they thought it worked, plus any side effects. To better understand the mysteries surrounding what drugs would be effective for long-term stays in space, Wotring designed an iOS app that six crewmembers aboard the ISS volunteered to use for logging their meds in 2017. Imagine trying to respond coherently after waking suddenly to a warning alarm while being “ ambientoxicated.” The researchers, some from Harvard Medical School, found the astronauts often took a second dose in the middle of the night, presumably because the first dose didn’t provide enough relief.īut multiplying medications can mean increasing risk of side effects, or in the case of Ambien, potential grogginess during an emergency. “That might not be the truth.”įor example, a 2014 study measured sleep deprivation in astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and the drugs they took to get to some rest, such as zolpidem, brand name Ambien. “At this point, we're making an assumption that medications get absorbed and distributed to tissues and metabolized and excreted mostly the same way in space,” Worting said. Which means, a physician's best tool is going to be the medication kit… This is something that merits attention, that astronauts deserve to know.”įurther Reading “The trampoline is working”-SpaceX returns human spaceflight to America “They can perform surgery, they can advise you to change your behavior-you know, stop smoking or whatever-or they can give you a medication. Virginia Wotring, a professor at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, told Ars. “If you go to the doctor, there are basically three things they can do for you,” Dr. There is some evidence that certain meds can be less potent in space and radiation may even degrade medications-but really, experts just aren’t sure.

While self-medicating in space has been common, there aren’t great records of who took what, when they took it, and how it did or didn’t help. Yet, despite 60 years of humanity sending individuals to space, there has been alarmingly little research into how meds work differently off-planet. But microgravity can also affect how medications are metabolized, potentially making drugs less effective or even toxic.

That extreme environment is known to warp the human body, shift fluids, and shrink bones, among other things. On top of that, of course, space itself poses potential medical issues. It makes designing a pharmacy for space extremely complicated. With the nearest Walgreens several hundred kilometers away, every medication an astronaut could possibly need on a space mission must be packed beforehand. But if an astronaut does catch the flu, it can be a major problem.