Brain Vessels Discovered in 2015 May Play Huge Role in TBI, Dementia, Alzheimer’s, CTE

 What have your doctors and stroke hospital done with this in the past 5 years? Contacted researchers to get useful followup research done? DONE NOTHING? Then get the board of directors fired.

Does your doctor want to prevent your dementia? Does your doctor have a sleep protocol for this?

A positive side sleeping suggestion here:

Lymphatic vessels cleaning system for the brain and are important for curing Alzheimers, MS, Stroke, TBI May 2017

A negative side sleeping suggestion here:

JFK Johnson Rehabilitation suggests that side sleeping may increase risk of stroke  Feb. 2017 

Your doctor has had three years to come up with a solution to these competing ideas. NO solution, fire him/her.

The latest here:

Brain Vessels Discovered in 2015 May Play Huge Role in TBI, Dementia, Alzheimer’s, CTE

 

In 2015, Jonathan Kipnis and his then-colleagues at the University of Virginia (UVA) became the first to prove the existence of lymphatic vessels that clean the human brain. Five years later, another UVA professor has made a groundbreaking discovery—those vessels play important roles in both Alzheimer's and the cognitive decline that comes with age.

John Lukens and his team found that even mild concussions can cause long-lasting impacts in the brain. According to his research, increased pressure on the lymphatic vessels—caused when the brain swells in response to injury and presses against the skull—seriously impairs the brain's ability to cleanse itself of toxins. In neuroscience, it is already widely accepted that the buildup of tau proteins is at least partially at fault for neurodegeneration. When brain vessels are too impaired to purge toxins, buildups occur.

For his study, published in Nature Communications, Lukens examined multiple pathways through which lymphatic dysfunction can exacerbate TBI. First, Lukens showed mice experienced a substantial decrease in drainage from the brain as early as 2 hours post-injury. Drainage remained significantly altered up to two months post-TBI, when it finally began returning to pre-injury levels. Additionally, the researchers detected even less drainage in mice that received a higher velocity injury, suggesting drainage is indeed affected by injury severity.

One of the biggest issues with neurodegenerative brain diseases is that researchers can’t seem to pin down why certain individuals experience it, while others don’t. There have been thousands of players in the NFL, but not all of them contract CTE. Why is that? Injury severity seems to be one consideration—but Lukens and his team found a second: people with pre-existing problems with their lymphatic vessel drainage experience worsened TBI.

Mice that were subjected to ablation before brain injury compared with those that underwent a TBI experienced a significant upregulation in specific genes, or inflammation.

“Upregulation of the complement pathway, while important for coordinating the innate immune response and for pruning synapses in development, can be highly detrimental for brain health later in life,” the authors explain. “For instance, overactivation of the complement system has been shown to be an early harbinger for neuronal loss and cognitive decline.”

In tests, mice with pre-existing lymphatic dysfunction plus TBI showed impaired motor learning as well as poorer recognition skills compared with mice who did not have any previous conditions. The researchers revealed the pre-existing group also had lower dendrite length, dendrite branch points and lower dendrite volume compared with the control groups.

“This provides some of the best evidence yet that if you haven't recovered from a brain injury and you get hit in the head again, you're going to have even more severe consequences," said Lukens. "This reinforces the idea that you have to give people an opportunity to heal. And if you don't, you're putting yourself at a much higher risk for long-term consequences that you might not see in a year but could see in a couple of decades."

Previous studies have shown that vascular endothelial growth factor C can increase the diameter of lymphatic vessels and even rejuvenate draining. Lukens and team found this was also the case for the aged mice in their studies, indicating a possible pathway in the battle against aging-related cognitive decline.

Photo: The discovery by UVA's John Lukens and Ashley Bolte helps explain why repeated brain injuries are so harmful and suggests they increase the risk of long-term problems. It also suggests a reason why blows to the head affect people differently. Credit: Dan Addison/UVA Communications