Groundbreaking Medical Discovery There have been multiple times in my life where I’ve been &ld
Groundbreaking Medical DiscoveryThere have been multiple times in my life where I’ve been “a day late and a dollar short” and apparently while I was in Alaska last summer, I missed something major. So forgive me if you’ve already heard this, but I’m excited.It has always been accepted knowledge in neuroscience that there was no direct connection between the brain and the immune system. This past summer, researchers with the University of Virginia’s Department of Neuroscience announced the discovery of previously unknown lymphatic vessels imbedded in the meninges (membranes surrounding the brain) that connect the brain to the peripheral immune system. The discovery of the new vessels was made by Dr. Antoine Louveau, a postdoctoral fellow working in UVA’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia (a.k.a. BIG) and his associates during a procedure to count the meninges of a mouse brain on a single microscope slide. Noticing vessel-like patterns in the way that the immune cells on his slide were distributed, Louveau realized that he’d found something important. The director of the center, Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, said that the lymphatic vessels had gone unnoticed for so long because they follow a major blood vessel down into the sinuses, which don’t show up well using imaging techniques.New questions now arise regarding a wide range of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis, where immune attacks are involved.CWImagehttp://bit.ly/1KioQA5Sourceshttp://bit.ly/1SUXGWqhttp://bit.ly/1Qk1jmrhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150601122445.htm -- source link
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