EFFECTS OF ZERO GRAVITY ON OUR HEART I returned from the John Glenn flight to a mountain of intelligence associated paperwork. The code name for this part of my intelligence work was "White Stork". It was far more time consuming than my Elint data consisting of bio-telemetry surreptitiously taken from the sky by well placed antennas and appropriate receivers. The deluge of paperwork from White Stork was the result of my key words passed along to thousands of people whose sole job was to screen all Soviet Bloc reports, newspapers, magazines and books for anything containing those key words. For example the key words “Vostok cosmonaut bio-instrumentation” might result in thousands of articles, month after month. This could get incredibly boring because there was so much repetition of content but none-the-less it had to be done and the more qualified the person the better the analysis. Now I had more time to devote to Soviet cosmonaut study for their Vostok missions. Most of their instrumentation was comparable to what we were doing. For most of our physiological functions like electrical activity of the heart (ECG) and blood pressure, there are only so many ways they can be measured but their precordial vibrocardiogram intrigued me from the very beginning. To measure this they were using an accelerometer placed over the sternum. No background data existed for this because only in zero gravity would this instrument function as designed. Once in a weightless environment however it could function as designed recording the tiny motions induced on the body by the contractions of the heart and circulation of blood through major arteries. I knew of no one in the United States who was considered knowledgeable in the use or interpretation of this device. It impressed me as having great potential to monitor circulatory function and especially the vigor of cardiac contractions in weightlessness yet there was no base of knowledge in our country. Any baseline data collected in the normal gravitational environment of Earth would be irrelevant to the readout of this same transducer in zero gravity for only in zero gravity would it have the three degrees of accelerative freedom for which it was designed (forward-backward, sideways and up and down). Only in zero gravity would the hydrostatic vector be eliminated. The precordial vibrocardiogram appeared on cosmonaut after cosmonaut through the Vostok and early Voskhod program. Soviet flight surgeons studied the tracings looking for any pattern shifts that might flag a change in heart action. This was an ingenious device designed to detect a weakening heart. We now have a renewed interest in this device on the International Space Station where we consistently observe a fainting tendency on returning astronauts. Some of this loss of gravity compensation is due to loss of circulating blood volume and vascular reflexes but we suspect much is due to a weaker heart action due to the heart having adapted to the lesser demands of zero gravity. Use of the precordial vibrocardiogram would permit us to study this part of the zero gravity adaptive process while still on the space station thereby being better able to predict “fainters”on return to Earth. I have recently passed this information on to NASA flight surgeon friends of mine and work on this is currently under way. I knew when I gave those highly classified talks to Pentagon and NASA chiefs the information never would get down to the guys who could use it and I was right. None of them had ever heard of my intelligence work. But the worse thing was that the department head politicians did not have the background to understand the significance of what I was talking about. I was just a talking head sent over by the intelligence guys for points in the administrative hierarchy – good for amusement. What a system.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 12:13:29 +0000
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