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Research shows that leakage in the blood-brain barrier is associated with forgetfulness in aging.
Have you forgotten where you laid your keys? Ever wondered where you had parked your car? Or having trouble remembering the name of the new neighbor? Unfortunately, these things seem to get worse as one gets older. A big question for researchers is where does benign forgetfulness end and true disease begin?
One of the keys to having a healthy brain at any age is having a healthy blood-brain barrier, a complex interface of blood vessels that run through the brain. Researchers reviewed more than 150 articles to look at what happens to the blood-brain barrier as we age. Their findings were
published March 15 in Nature Aging.
Whether the changes to the blood-brain barrier alters brain function is still up for debate. But research shows the blood-brain barrier leaks as we age, and we lose cells called pericytes.
"It turns out very little is known how the blood-brain barrier ages," said lead author William Banks, a gerontology researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine and at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Health Care System. "It's often hard to tell normal aging from early disease."
The blood-brain barrier, discovered in the late 1800s, prevents the unregulated leakage of substances from blood into the brain. The brain is an especially sensitive organ and cannot tolerate direct exposure to many of the substances in the blood. Increasingly, scientists have realized that the blood-brain barrier also allows many substances into the brain in a regulated way to serve the nutritional needs of the brain. It also transports informational molecules from the blood to the brain and pumps toxins out of the brain. A malfunctioning blood-brain barrier can contribute to diseases such as multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and Alzheimer's.
Before scientists can understand how such malfunctioning can contribute to the diseases of aging, they need to understand how a healthy blood-brain barrier normally ages.
Comment: While the above is undoubtedly true, its interesting that AstraZeneca is getting all the press for its problems, while the big players like Pfizer and Moderna are seemingly getting a pass (despite problems). Could it be that there's a subtle push toward the mRNA vaccines by making the non-mRNA ones look bad?
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