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According to the World Health Organization 57 million people suffered with dementia worldwide in the year 2021. Over 60% of them live in low-and middle-income countries. Every year, there are nearly 10 million new cases. It is a cruel disease too. You start forgetting things: names, your college years, and at times your own beloved daughter. What makes it worse is that it is, till date, untreatable. But what if it could be prevented? What if there was a way to hunt it? Well, a handful of scientists from Korea claim that they have taken a huge stride in achieving exactly that.
The Glymphatic System
In a world’s firsts, scientists from Korea claim that they had created a non-invasive diagnostic method using near-infrared spectroscopy (a technique to take a peek inside our body using infrared light that could monitor in real-time the activity of the glymphatic system, which discharges brain waste during sleep. The research team consisted of Professor Yun Chang-ho, head of Bundang Seoul National University Hospital's Department of Neurology, and Professor Bae Hyun-min at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The scientists claimed that their device could monitor in real-time if brain waste that leads to dementia is being released during sleep.
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Let’s understand what that means. Think of your brain as a happening room with people moving around in different directions, doing different chores. But when the people working in the room go to sleep, the sweeper (cerebrospinal fluid) comes and washes away the waste left by the workers in your brain. Cerebrospinal fluid (the sweeper) itself is released into the brain deeply along the area around the blood vessels via the meningeal lymphatic system or cervical lymph nodes. The whole system is named the glymphatic system.
Tracking The Cause Of Dementia And Alzheimer’s
One of these brain ‘wastes’ that is metabolised (used by) in the brain during sleep is amyloid beta protein, which is reported to be a cause of Alzheimer's disease. Amyloid beta secures nerve cells, but when it breaks away from outside the brain cells and clusters together, it ends up killing the nerve cells. Basically, it is a wolf among the sheep.
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The researchers were able to quantify the flow of fluids within the body of the brain in real time by utilising a wireless near-infrared spectrometer that is sensitive to changes in moisture. The wireless near-infrared spectrometer works attached to the forehead, sending near-infrared light of 700-1000 nm (nanometers, one billionth of a meter) wavelengths into the skull, and measures the rates of absorption of scattered light to determine brain moisture content, oxygen saturation, blood flow, and so on.
Specifically, employing the 925 nm wavelength responsive to moisture, the investigators clarified that an algorithm removing the influence of brain blood flow (plasma moisture) from measured moisture content enables accurate assessment of the moisture directly associated with glymphatic (brain cleaning) activity.
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In a study published in the journal of the International Society for Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism last month, the researchers monitored 41 healthy adults with the device to verify that the moisture level in the frontal lobe increased substantially in the transition from wakefulness to non-rapid eye movement (NREM: deep) sleep. This finding demonstrates that brain washing activity is engaged as they move into deeper stages of sleep, in line with the glymphatic activation patterns seen in animal studies.
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Bottomline
As individuals go into deeper levels of sleep, their brain's self-cleaning mechanism—the glymphatic system—is also more activated. This mechanism flushes out waste and toxins accumulated throughout the day, something observed in animal research as well. Professor Yun Chang-ho, one of the authors of the study, described that this finding shows how sleep and brain health intersect. He said that the study could lay the groundwork for detecting signs of dementia and other brain disorders earlier, tracking individuals who may be at risk, assessing the effectiveness of sleep treatments, and even crafting individualised care plans to maintain a healthy brain.