Human Physiology During Exposure to the Cave Environment: A Systematic Review With Implications for Aerospace Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Successful long-duration missions outside low-Earth orbit will depend on technical and physiological challenges under abnormal environmental conditions. Caves, characterized by absence of light, confinement, three-dimensional human movement and long-duration isolation, are identifiably one of the earliest examples of scientific enquiry into space analogues. However, little is known about the holistic human physiological response during cave exploration or prolonged habitation. The aim of our review was to conduct a systematic bibliographic research review of effects of short and prolonged exposure to cave environment on human physiology, with a view to extend the results to implications for human planetary exploration missions. Methods: A systematic search was conducted following the structured PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines for electronic databases. Results: The search retrieved 1519 studies. There were 50 articles selected for further revision, of which 31 met our inclusion criteria. Cardiovascular, endocrine-metabolic, immunologic-haematological, muscular responses and visual dysfunction were investigated in short-term exposure cave studies. Prolonged exposure studies mainly investigated whether biological rhythms persist or desist in the absence of standard environmental conditions. Studies have shown a reasonable interference based on specific subterranean protocols already with short exposure. During underground cave isolation changes in circadian system frequency are demonstrated. Conclusions: This review facilitates further comparison with knowledge in related disciplines pertaining to human preparation in challenging environments, stimulates research, and offers an opportunity to utilise this overview to inform advanced study design and noteworthy research focus in future human space analogue research in subterranean environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".