Spaceflight: Immune Effects and Nutritional Countermeasure

Microgravity is predicted to be a significant challenge to immune system during space travel. Consequences of weakened immune responses range from increased disease susceptibility to neoplastic growth. Degree of immune dysfunction is considered proportional to duration of stay in spaceflights. As a result of these risks, there is major concern over potential health risk for space travels that ultimately result in serious and considerable loss of mission objectives. Therefore, here is a need to explore the immune effects of spaceflight and its countermeasures. Several attempts have been made to develop effective measure to alleviate or prevent immune dysfunction due to microgravity. Among them, immunonutritional model has been shown to effectively modulate and upregulate immune system. This is further supported by our experiments demonstrating that supplementation of nutritional substrates like nucleotide and mushroom extracts active hexose-correlated compound (AHCC) effective in maintaining or restoring immunity in microgravity analog models