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A team of scientists at Oregon Health & Science University conducted a study that may explain how the human brain can actually clean out waste. Such proteins - or waste - have been scientifically linked to Alzheimer’s Disease when it builds up inside the human brain.
Scientists have long examined this process of excreting waste within the brains of mice but have yet found substantial evidence of the same process occurring in humans, until now.
Over a decade ago, scientists at the University of Rochester in New York discovered a network that they named the “glymphatic system.”
Research scientists at the University of Rochester injected mice with a protein linked to Alzheimer's called beta-amyloid. They determined that the system’s channels acted as if highways, operating most efficiently at non-rush hour travel times, and moving the waste more quickly away from the brain as the laboratory mice slept.
A normal MRI scan can spot some of these channels but yet to show their function. So instead, scientists have used a special type of imaging scan able to spot a tiny channel that can get rid of waste in the human brain.
Recognizing this, Oregon Health & Science University researcher Dr. Juan Piantino, M.D. and his team injected a tracer into five human patients who were to be undergoing brain surgery.
Within 24 to 48 hours, they found the tracer was moving through these human brain channels, just as it had in laboratory mice in the prior study. Their determination is that the waste gets removed through a process that pushes the fluid from deep in the brain to the surface.
This unwanted material is then absorbed into the bloodstream and taken out to the liver and kidneys to be excreted by the body.
One of the most noteworthy waste products researchers found was being removed in this process is amyloid, which is otherwise known for sticking to the human brain of individuals suffering with the impact of Alzheimer's.
However, sleep and other treatments may not be the only way to improve this waste clearance passageway in the brain.
Animal studies have also shown that an old blood pressure drugs used to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) may be one other way to improve glymphatic function. Research scientist Jeff Iliff, PhD of the University of Washington said, “I have to be able to measure glymphatic function in people.”
University of Washington's Dr. Elaine Peskind, M.D. adds that additional studies are certainly needed in this area and that their research team's goal is to identify noninvasive ways to further this research, saying “We cannot study all these questions by injecting people.”
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