Research Hit: Restoring Your Brain's Waste Disposal System to Youthful Levels
New research shows how a drug can reactivate our brain's waste removal system to perform at the same levels as in youth
So remind me of how our brains’s waste removal system works?
This was first described in 2012 by Maiken Nedergaard et al. (and this research is from her research group at University of Rochester Medical Center). They described a lymphatic drainage system that helps to remove toxins and accumulated waste out of the brain - mostly during sleep. This was pretty groundbreaking at the time.
Your brain sits in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and this has been shown to be more important than previously thought - this is pumped in and out of your brain through the lymphatic system.
Any biological process generates waste products and the build up of these will lead to dysfunction over time and is a key feature of aging and multiple neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s. So understanding how this works is good news but reactivating this process even more so!
How does this pump work?
Well there are a few ways - one I reported on previously is through the brain waves but the other key one is through lamphanglions - basically little lymph nodes which all operate as mini pumps - for brain drainage in the neck. The lymphatic drainage system is therefore a distributed system and not dependent on any single centralised systems (such as your heart for blood).
And what happens to these with age then?
Well, that is precisely the point - with age these mini pumps decrease in activity. This means they pump less of the waste products out of our brains and these waste products can therefore build up and cause all sorts of cognitive impairment and contribute to cognitive decline.
In mice these leads to a decreased output from the brain of 63% - that’s a lot!
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Wow, a decrease of 63% sounds pretty important - but you said these researchers have found a drug to counteract this?
Yes, and that is the exciting bit. But caveat is that this is in mice only so far.
They found a drug called prostaglandin F2α - which funnily enough is used to induce labor. It helps with muscle contraction and because these small lymph nodes are covered in a very thin layer of muscle - this revitalised and boosted pumping capability. When injected into lamphanglions in the neck activity returned to youthful levels.
So, we have a way to completely revitalise our waste drainage from the brain?!
Well, not quite yet. It works one-off in mice but it is still complex to apply (multiple small injections in precisely the right places in dozens of location in the neck). But the good news is we know the system, we know how it operates, we know where it is, and we know how to reactivate it.
So watch this space!
I will! And in the meantime I will massage my lamphanglions!
Ting Du, Aditya Raghunandan, Humberto Mestre, et al.
Restoration of cervical lymphatic vessel function in aging rescues cerebrospinal fluid drainage.
Nature Aging, 2024
DOI: 10.1038/s43587-024-00691-3