研究表明睡眠清除大脑垃圾_BEC初级作文

研究表明睡眠清除大脑垃圾

She then became curious about how the glymphatic system behaves during the sleep-wake cycle.

An imaging technique called two-photon microscopy enabled the scientists to watch the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through a live mouse brain in real time. After soothing the creature until it was sound asleep, study author Lulu Xie tagged the fluid with a special fluorescent dye.

“During sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid flushed through the brain very quickly and broadly,” said Rochester neuropharmacologist Xie. As another experiment revealed, sleep causes the space between cells to increase by 60 percent, allowing the flow to increase.

Xie then gently touched the mouse’s tail until it woke up from its nap, and she again injected it with dye. This time, with the mouse awake, flow in the brain was greatly constrained.

“Brain cells shrink when we sleep, allowing fluid to enter and flush out the brain,” Nedergaard said. “It’s like opening and closing a faucet.”

They also found that the harmful beta-amyloid protein clears out of the brain twice as fast in a sleeping rodent as in an up-and-about one. The study was published in the journal Science on Thursday.

New York University cell biologist and Alzheimer’s specialist Ralph A. Nixon, who was not involved in the study, said the findings could be of great interest to the Alzheimer’s research community. For instance, the overproduction of beta-amyloid could be linked to the development of the disease, but he said these new findings hint that the lack of clearing it out might be the bigger problem.