Monitoring infradians, notably ~5-months cycles of cosmonauts for science and health

Franz Halberg, Germaine Cornelissen

Halberg Chronobiology Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Current technology allows half-hourly around-the-clock monitoring of blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) over long spans, as implemented in some cases for decades, e.g., by a man at 90 years of age. Such monitoring, even if it is interrupted for uneaqual short spans of special unemcumbered activity analyzed by the extended cosinor reveals quasi-periodicity, so called because periods, tau, are not reliably detectable by many other computer programs now in use.

The methods have been developed to examine, in long even somewhat unequidistant time series as a whole, globally, and in their consecutive sections, time-varyingly, the behavior of a set of cycles that mimic those found in physics, including the photic terrestrial day and year. The calendar-year component may be complemented, even replaced by mimicked cycles in particle radiations from space weather, in helioseismology, in relative sunspot numbers, in solar flares, in solar wind parameters, such as speed and proton density, in other inter-planetary and terrestrial magnetism, gravity and broadly in nonphotic features of the electromagnetic spectrum. Pertinent to missions to the Moon and Mars are weekly and two-weekly and about 27-day taus of the solar rotation around its axis at the equator and beat periods with solar rotations at different higher solar latitudes, and interaction with lunar periods. These taus have been found on earth for up to 42 years of physiological and psychological as well as much longer epidemiological time series (1-3). Comparisons of these series obtained on earth with data of similar density and accumulating length in space may provide information about 7-day rhythms that are characteristic of the human infant and of other multiseptans, multiples and submultiples of the week that have been shown to be coherent cross-spectrally with geomagnetics.

Recently, about 5-month cycles predicted as a beat period of solar rotations by Charles Wolff have been found by Rieger et al., and very many others in solar flares, and we have found this about 5-month (about 154-day or about 0.42-year0 period in a 15-year series of 17-ketosteroids in two sets of time series summarized by the MESOR and the circadian amplitude of the 24-hour profiles of 172 individuals sampled over the years for circulating melatonin. We further demonstrate this ~5-month cycle of the solar wind as a tau with overlapping 95% confidence intervals computed according to Marquardt, also in six separate series made up of the data on circulating melatonin from all patients analyzed at midnight, at noon and series at 04:00, 08:00, 16:00 and 20:00 (4). The same components of about 5 months have been found in an about 10-year series of diastolic and a 16-year series of systolic blood pressure and in self-measured series of heart rate over 42 years. Periods clearly different from the precise year again mimicking periods in solar wind speed or solar flares, dubbed transyears, have been found in blood pressure and heart rate, and what is particularly important, in sudden cardiac death along with about 5-month periods which latter we dubbed cis-halfyears.

With cosmonauts in space, there will be an opportunity to see how these same periods behave in terms of extent of change and timing when they are away from earth, preferably outside earth's magnetic shield, and under conditions of microgravity. It is important that a transyear also characterizes military-political affairs and in particular terrorism (1, 5). Again, one could obtain for the first time information on periodicities that may underlie the many signatures of cis-halfyears and perhaps in longer space flights also gain information on transyears.

It would also be desirable to obtain information before and after a flight for at least several years on those who venture into space and thus the start of such monitoring is overdue. It would also be possible to monitor steroids and melatonin, preferably in urine or at least in saliva, so that mechanisms of how cycles affect us may become available. There is already opportunistic information on earth concerning the effect of magnetic storms on in situ melatonin in the pineal and hypothalamus, and on corticosterone from animal experiments (6). The opportunity to explore infradians in microgravity and away from the earth's shield may be one of the more important challenges that only monitoring during space flight can answer.

References

1.  Halberg F, Cornelissen G, Sothern RB, Katinas GS, Schwartzkopff O, Otsuka K. Cycles tipping the scale between death and survival (= "life"). Invited presentation, Nishinomiya-Yukawa International & Interdisciplinary Symposium 2007, What is Life? The Next 100 Years of Yukawa's Dream, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, October 15-20, 2007. Progress of Theoretical Physics 2008; Suppl. 173: 153-181.

2.  Halberg F, Kenner T, Fiser B, Siegelova J, eds. Proceedings, Noninvasive Methods in Cardiology, Brno, Czech Republic, October 4-7, 2008. 304 pp. http://web.fnusa.cz/files /kfdr2008/sbornik_2008.pdf

3.  Halberg F, Kenner T, Fiser B, Siegelova J, eds. Proceedings, Noninvasive Methods in Cardiology 2009. Brno, Czech Republic, July 7-10, 2009. (Dedicated to the 90th Anniversary of Prof. Franz Halberg.) 402 pp. http://web.fnusa.cz/files/kfdr2009 /sbornik_2009.pdf

4.  Cornelissen G, Tarquini R, Perfetto F, Otsuka K, Gigolashvili M, Halberg F. About 5-month cycle in human circulating melatonin: signature of weather in extraterrestrial space? Poster presentation, Fourth UN/ESA/NASA/JAXA Workshop on the International Heliophysical Year 2007 and Basic Space Science: "First Results from the International Heliophysical Year 2007", Sozopol, Bulgaria, June 2-6, 2008.

5.  Grigoryev PYe, Vladimirskii BM. The cosmic weather affects the terrorist activity. Uchenye zapiski Tavricheskogo Natsionalnogo Universiteta im V.I. Vernadskogo, Series "Biology, chemistry" 2007; 20 (59) (No. 1): 28-46.

Jozsa R, Halberg F, Cornelissen G, Zeman M, Kazsaki J, Csernus V, Katinas GS, Wendt HW, Schwartzkopff O, Stebelova K, Dulkova K, Chibisov SM, Engebretson M, Pan W, Bubenik GA, Nagy G, Herold M, Hardeland R, Huether G, Poeggeler B, Tarquini R, Perfetto F, Salti R, Olah A, Csokas N, Delmore P, Otsuka K, Bakken EE, Allen J, Amory-Mazaudier C. Chronomics, neuroendocrine feedsidewards and the recording and consulting of nowcasts forecasts of geomagnetics. Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy 2005; 59 (Suppl 1): S24-S30.

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