‘Real zero gravity’: B.C. anesthesiologist researches how anesthetic behaves in space

A local anesthesiologist is sharing the findings of some out-of-this-world research.

For anesthesiologist Dr. Matthew Turnock, it was a research project that felt “out of this world.”

That’s because as part of the research, Turnock and his team experienced microgravity for the first time, floating as though they were in space.

“It was a blast, for sure. Very intense, but a lot of fun,” said Turnock, who works out of Eagle Ridge and Royal Columbian hospitals.

“Your brain has no idea what is up and what is down,” he said.

The experience came as part of a unique space medicine research project trying to determine how anesthetic drugs would behave on a patient when there is no gravity.

“In space, giving an anesthetic is challenging because of the space and volume requirements, and also a lot of the anesthetics we give are inhaled. So, if there’s an accidental circuit disconnection, the entire crew of a spacecraft could be anesthetized, which would be a really bad thing,” explained Turnock.

He said that using CT images of a real person, the team developed a model of a spinal canal and filled it with simulated spinal fluid.

“There’s a chance the medication could float up to the brain. Sometimes we see that here on Earth. We call it a high spinal,” he explained.

From there, the team headed to France where an airbus A310 became their temporary lab. The plane would climb and then drop to create brief periods of weightlessness.

“Every time the aircraft crests that peak you get about 25 seconds of zero gravity,” Turnock said.

“And it’s not simulated, it’s real zero gravity, exactly how an astronaut would feel in space.”

It was during these moments of weightlessness that they conducted their research.

‘If we remove gravity, we hypothesized that the medication actually wouldn’t spread at all, which is what we found. So, this risk of a high spinal, of the medication floating to the brain, is probably not actually a warranted risk,” he said.

What they discovered was actually the opposite problem.

“The medication doesn’t spread enough for it work, but there are things we can investigate to perhaps promote the spread of medication,” explained Turnock.

All this has led to more questions—and a quest by the team to find answers through future space research.

The team also included Dr. Alex Suen, an anesthesiologist; Dr. Siobhan Wagner, an anesthesiologist resident; and Adrian Tabari, a UBC medical student,

The project was funded by the Canadian Space Agency.