Waves of cerebrospinal fluid which normally wash over brains during sleep can be made to pulse in the brains of people who are wide awake, a new study finds.
The clear fluid may flush out harmful waste, such as the sticky proteins that accumulate in Alzheimer’s disease (SN: 7/15/18). So being able to control the fluid’s flow in the brain could possibly one day have implications for treating certain brain disorders.
“I think this [finding] will help with many neurological disorders,” says Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study. “Think of Formula One. You can have the best car and driver, but without a great maintenance crew, that driver will not win the race.” Spinal fluid flow in the brain is a major part of that maintenance crew, he says. But he and other researchers, including the study’s authors, caution that any potential therapeutic applications are still far off.
In 2019, neuroscientist Laura Lewis of Boston University and colleagues reported that strong waves of cerebrospinal fluid wash through our brains while we slumber, suggesting that one unappreciated role of sleep may be to give the brain a deep clean (SN: 10/31/19). And the team showed that the slow neural oscillations that characterize deep, non-REM sleep occur in lockstep with the waves of spinal fluid through the brain.
“If you drop your clothes in a bath of water, eventually dirt will come out. But if you swish them back and forth, things are moving much more effectively,” Lewis says. “That’s the analogy I think of.”
These flows were far larger than the small, rhythmic influences that one’s breathing and heartbeat have on spinal fluid.
The researchers think that as brain activity during sleep causes blood to flow through the brain — bringing oxygen to power-hungry cells — the spinal fluid flows in behind the blood to maintain constant pressure inside the skull.
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