Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the leading causes of chronic liver diseases in the world. The biopsy is required to confirm the diagnosis but due to its invasiveness, this procedure is not suitable for the massive screening. There are laboratory criteria of primary medical examination of the patients who are suspected to have NAFLD that allow diagnosing the pathological process, but these criteria do not comply with clinicians’ requirements. At the same time, it is crucial to identify the patients in the initial stages of NAFLD. Recently, the attention of the scientists was concentrated on the research of the mechanism of NAFLD development and new diagnostic approaches. Accumulating results of this research show that NAFLD development is regulated with epigenetic factors, including microRNAs family (microRNA, miR), that may have high diagnostic and prognostic value. In this review, data extracted from PubMed are used to discuss the potential role of microRNA in the liver lipid metabolism and fatty liver disease. The possibilities of micro RNA (miR-16, miR-21, miR-34a, miR-103, miR-122, miR-145, miR-192, and others) use as prospective biomarkers for low-invasive NAFLD diagnostic, evaluation of steatosis activity and fibrosis score and stages, and prognostic markers of the disease are reviewed. This research discusses the analytical characteristics, benefits and possible limitations of their use in the clinical practice. The preliminary data allow claiming that some microRNAs are extremely perspective low-invasive diagnostic instrument and further research is required to investigate the impact of certain microRNAs in the pathogenetic mechanism of NAFLD development.

Medical support is one of the essential safety conditions for isolation or confinement experiments, as it enables the timely arrangement of actions to preserve the health of crew members and volunteers. Such analog experiments allow the testing of prospective medical technologies and methods for health support in long-term space missions and on-planet stations. In the current paper, we report the results of the medical control within the medical support system of the two model isolation experiments of the SIRIUS series, lasting for 4 and 8 months, respectively. The results indicate the prevalence of headache complaints, skin inflammatory reactions, and sleep disturbance during the longer confinement experiment. In addition, signs of vitamin D deficiency were revealed in 10 of the 12 objects. The data exchange with the scientific branch of the experiments provides for the in-time detection of early symptoms of disease, using samples of blood, urine, saliva, epithelia, etc. However, the issues of medical data confidence and, subsequently, of the crew members’ compliance with the medical staff, become pointed. In general, the work demonstrates the expediency of the investigations, including the data collection and analysis of the medical control indicators in further experiments, for the optimization of the medical support of both the analogous research projects and the development of the recommendations for the medical support of small autonomous groups, such as manned space missions.

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