A drug used to induce labor in pregnant women has been shown to reactivate tiny waste-clearing pumps in the brains of old mice. The finding could hold promise as a new way to fight Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and overall cognitive decline. When our brains are working properly, there is an excess of proteins that build up from the energy intensive processes that take place between our neurons.
Those proteins need to be removed in order for the brain to continue to operate properly. When they aren't, they can gunk up the works, leading to the beta amyloid and tau protein tangles that are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease or the build up of alpha-synuclein that accompanies Parkinson's. In 2012 Danish neuroscientist, Maiken Nedergaard that uses cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to remove waste from the brain and termed it the glymphatic system.
Now, Nedergaard and her colleagues have looked deeper into the glymphatic system, focusing on lymph vessels called lymphangions. These are a series of tiny pumps in the neck that are responsible for moving dirty CSF out of the brain and into the lymph system where it ultimately reaches the kidneys to be processed. Using advanced particle tracking in mice models, they found that as the rodents aged, the contractions in these pumps decreased.
As a result, they found that older mice had 63% less dirty CSF flowing out of their brains compared to younger mice, setting the stage for the rodents to suffer cognitive decline. Wondering if they cou.