New Technologies for Assessing Health in Essentially Healthy People

摘要

This article discusses the problems of developing new techniques for assessing health in essentially healthy people, based on the experience of many years of studying cosmonauts at the Institute of Medical- Biological Problems, Russian Academy of Sciences, led by Academician A. I. Grigor'ev. The monograph Concepts of Health in Space Medicine was published in 2007 and described principles for assessing health in essentially healthy people working in conditions of chronic stress. These principles were put into practice in the same year by development of the Ecosan-2007 apparatus. This was trialed on bus drivers and civil pilots and has been used in the Mars 500 project since 2009. All these developments and investigations were performed with the support of the "Basic sciences - medicine" Program of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the initiator and coordinator of the investigations was Academician A. I. Grigor'ev. In the Mars 500 project, six members of an international "Mars" crew were studied in a hermetically sealed chamber simulating a spacecraft. The Ecosan-2007 apparatus was used, among others. This apparatus was used to assess a further 125 subjects in 12 different parts of the world, living in natural social-industrial conditions. These long-term medical-ecological studies yielded important experimental grounds for a preclinical approach to assessment of health. A methodology for the remote assessment of the effects of ecological factors on health was developed in the framework of these studies, and this gave rise to a new applied scientific area - telemedicine ecology. The article concludes by evaluated questions of the further introduction of new techniques for preclinical diagnosis into healthcare practice.