Neuroscience affiliated faculty, Jeniffer Munson and her collaborators at the University of Virginia discovered that dysfunction of drainage pathways in the brain can aggravate cognitive decline as well as Alzheimer’s disease pathology.

Now research from a collaborative team of neuroscientists and engineers at Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia is shedding light on the underlying mechanisms of brain aging, along with associated neurological diseases. The team was led by Jonathan Kipnis, chair of neuroscience at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

The study, published this week in Nature, demonstrated that meningeal lymphatic vessels in the brain, newly discovered in 2014 by several members of the same team, play an essential role in maintaining a healthy homeostasis in aging brains and could be a new target for treatment. 

“As you age, the fluid movement in your brain slows, sometimes to a pace that’s half of what it was when you were younger,” said Munson. “We discovered that the proteins responsible for Alzheimer’s actually do get drained through these lymphatic vessels in the brain along with other cellular debris, so any decrease in flow is going to affect that protein build-up.”

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