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Impact of Microgravity on the Skin and the Process of Wound Healing

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Abstract

Microgravity is a component of the complex environment in space. Due to its adverse effects on the human body, it poses unknown obstacles to the implementation of space missions. In microgravity, the body often loses the point of force and it is difficult to control itself, which leads to various accidental collisions. As the largest organ of the human body, the skin is often damaged by traumatic injury because of its large contact area with the external environment. In this study, we summarized and discussed the latest research on the impact of weightlessness or simulated microgravity on the skin and the process of wound healing to further understand the changes and mechanisms of wound healing. A series of studies have investigated the effects of weightlessness or simulated microgravity on the human skin and the wound healing process. Under microgravity environment, the skin showed certain changes, such as thinning and altered blood supply; microgravity also affected various cellular functions and their associations with the extracellular matrix during wound healing. Various stages of wound healing and sophisticated interactions between the elements involved in wound healing become disordered in a microgravity environment. However, more studies are needed to further understand the impact and mechanisms of microgravity on the trauma repair process to provide theoretical guidance for wound healing. With the support and help of a lot of good researches and trails, accidental trauma will no longer be an obstacle to human exploration of space.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge all authors whose publications were included in our article.

Funding

This work was supported by: (1) the Fund of Strategic Support Force Medical Center (09ZX25); (2) 2018 Logistics Open Research and Scientific Research Project (CZZ18j010).

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Author notes

  1. Jia-Qi Yang, Pei-Ming Sun, Yan Cui and Jin-Lian Zhou these author contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of General Surgery, The 306th Hospital of Chinese PLA-Peking University Teaching Hospital, Beijing, 100101, China

    Jia-Qi Yang, Yuan Yue, Song Guo, Zheng-Yang Chen & Sheng-Yu Lu

  2. Department of General Surgery, Strategic Support Force Medical Center, Beijing, 100101, China

    Jia-Qi Yang, Pei-Ming Sun, Yuan Yue, Zheng-Peng Li, Song Guo, Zheng-Yang Chen, Bin-Bin Li, Shao-Bin Chai, Sheng-Yu Lu, Hong-Feng Yan, Tao Zhang, Hong-Wei Sun, Jian-Wu Yang, He-Ming Yang & Yan Cui

  3. The Center for Hepatopancreatobiliary Diseases, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, Beijing, 102218, China

    Nan Jiang

  4. Department of Pathology, Strategic Support Force Medical Center, Beijing, 100101, China

    Jin-Lian Zhou

Authors
  1. Jia-Qi Yang
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Contributions

The study’s conception and design were performed by JY, PS, JZh and YC. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by JY, NJ,YY, ZL, SG, ZC, and BL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by JY, JN, and ZL. SC, SL, HY, PS, JY and JZ interpreted the data. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jin-Lian Zhou or Yan Cui.

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Yang, JQ., Sun, PM., Jiang, N. et al. Impact of Microgravity on the Skin and the Process of Wound Healing. Microgravity Sci. Technol. 33, 64 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12217-021-09907-2

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