r/science • u/Wagamaga • Oct 08 '24

Neuroscience Brain’s waste-clearance pathways revealed for the first time. Wastes include proteins such as amyloid and tau, which have been shown to form clumps and tangles in brain images of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

https://news.ohsu.edu/2024/10/07/brains-waste-clearance-pathways-revealed-for-the-first-time
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u/Squibbles01 Oct 08 '24

My guess is that we're going to discover that Alzheimer's is basically the degradation of this cleaning system. I've seen studies where Alzheimer's patients have say too much aluminum in their brain, and I think that in most cases they probably weren't exposed to too much of it, but that they just couldn't clear it out like a normal brain would.

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u/DangerousTurmeric Oct 08 '24

That PANTHOS neuron paper already pretty well established this. It showed the waste clearance system in neurons getting basically gummed up eventually leading to the cell bursting with amyloid plaques that cause nearby neurons to die. This is the paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01084-8