The lymphatic system of the brain
Scientists have confirmed the brain's ability to remove waste through the lymphatic system
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
The vessels of the lymphatic system complement the blood vessels. They branch throughout the body, transferring immune cells, bubbles with lipids and other molecules, removing their waste products from organs and tissues. Only the brain was considered an organ where the lymphatic vessels did not penetrate, which led to the question of how it gets rid of a serious amount of "waste"? Only a couple of years ago, in experiments on laboratory mice, it was possible to detect lymphatic vessels in the upper dura mater.
The discovery shocked specialists accustomed to the classical views from textbooks, and many began to explore the lymphatic system of the brain with a new zeal. Daniel Reich and his colleagues from the American National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) used a highly sensitive tomograph for this. The results of their work are presented in an article published by the journal eLife.
Scientists conducted a scan of brain vessels in five healthy volunteers. At the same time, the contrast agent gadobutrol was used, the molecules of which are small enough to pass through the walls of blood vessels and enter the outer meninges, but too large to overcome the hemato-encephalic barrier and end up in the inner parts of the brain itself.
Such observations indicated the presence in the outer membranes of the brain of an extensive network of the thinnest lymphatic vessels, almost as thick as the circulatory one. To further confirm these results, the experiment was repeated with two volunteers who also received a second contrast, with larger molecules that are unable to leave the blood capillaries. So the authors were able to separately identify the vessels of the circulatory and lymphatic systems in the dura mater of the brain, showing that there are both.
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