Female astronauts face clotting risks, five-day weightlessness simulation sugges | Hacker News Reader

Female astronauts face clotting risks, five-day weightlessness simulation sugges

phys.org

12 pointsbookmtn7 comments

Reminds me of surgery teams trying to argue (with pre-/post-menopausal and trans women) that estrogen shouldn’t be taken before surgery because of the clotting risks — of a hormone that has simple coin-flip odds of being irreversibly present in their patients, and is also considered by many surgical teams to correlate with different clotting behaviors than men. (Not necessarily more clots, but certainly not the same ones they’re accustomed to.)

Long-term, I expect the headline would likely be improved by stating instead:

“NASA zero-gee sim reaffirms that women have different clotting behaviors than men”

But selling that argument to U.S. researchers is an entire problem of its own; perhaps another presidential cycle.

as a trans woman, the clotting risk of estrogen proportional to levels is always cited to me by medical professionals when speaking about hrt, the risks, ...

i've always found it kind of weird, like being told taking estrogen will cause "increased chance of breast cancer"; yeah, if you grow breasts, you will have more breast cells, more cell division, more chance for errors, no? but that's (at least partially) why i'm doing the whole thing to begin with...? :p

and then they skimp on the doses...

if this were statistically significant to such a degree that it truly mattered, women would not live longer than men on average. i feel like people get lost in the sheer stats of it

The underlying summary is interesting. In women (whether or not trans), the synthetics increase clotting risk more than the bioidenticals do; and, separately, oral dosing pathways increase clotting risk more than liver-bypassing pathways (patch, gel, etc). I'd like to see more women asked by their surgical team to switch to transdermal patches before surgery rather than asked to stop taking their hormones. Recovery will be worse with preventable hormone imbalances, after all.

Odd then that with 25 of the 120 people who have crewed the ISS[1] being women we haven't seen anyone develop serious clots?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crew_of_the_Internatio...

the way that female phisiology is optimised for child bearing centers on blood flow to the placenta (and a whole new human), and then the very sudden removal of that WHOLE system in a survivable way is focused on two things, one is that the internal structure of the womb, literaly acts as a mechanical shear to sever the placenta, and two, instant powerfull but highly controlled, clotting, which as we all know can sometimes over or under react. that such a complex system can continue to function at all in zero gravity is a testement to how conservative natural design and engineering is,and "solving" the problem faced by female astronauts is going to require a much deeper understanding than throwing a hormone at it. Nature has solved problems like this many times, by the simple expedient of throwing more males at it untill the problem goes away. or as I like to answer sometimes as to how I am going to solve a problem I say "I will use anger and stupidity, wish me luck"

s/sugges/&ts/

They should do this study on unvaccinated women.

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