Method: To address this issue empirically, we retrospectively examined the data from our 4 ˝-year NASA-funded study of crewmember and mission control interactions during the Shuttle/Mir space program. Three of the authors (NK, VG, CF) identified eight items of stage one asthenia from one of our measures, the Profile of Mood States (POMS). Scores on these items from 13 Russian and American crewmembers were compared to a prototype derived from six Russian space experts.
Results: Our subject scores were significantly lower than the expert prototype on seven of the eight items, and the scores generally were in the “not at all” to “a little” range. There were no differences in mean scores across the four quarters of the missions, and there were no differences in response between Russian and American crewmembers.
Conclusions: As operationally defined using the POMS, we could not demonstrate the presence of asthenia in space. However, the POMS only addressed emotional and not physiological aspects of the syndrome, and the subject responses in our study generally were skewed in the direction of adaptive functioning. Further research on this syndrome needs to be done and should include physiological and objective measures that are specific to asthenia.