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/notraptorfaniswear Oct 08 '24

This has been known since I was in college 8 years ago. Basically our cells get old too. This is why they always tell you to eat antioxidants. Beta amyloid plaques and tau also show up in concussions.

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u/nixtracer Oct 08 '24

Eating antioxidants is doubly pointless. Firstly almost none of them can get into cells at all, but even if they did this stuff is tightly regulated: too low a level of free radicals is treated as a signal to the mitochondria that they should ramp up, generating more (and too many inhibits their activity). Net effect: at best nil, at worst the opposite of what you wanted.