This is a rather odd science story:
How 40Hz sensory gamma rhythm stimulation clears amyloid in Alzheimer's mice
Studies at MIT and elsewhere are producing mounting evidence that light flickering and sound clicking at the gamma brain rhythm frequency of 40 Hz can reduce Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression and treat symptoms in human volunteers as well as lab mice.
In a new study in Nature using a mouse model of the disease, researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory of MIT reveal a key mechanism that may contribute to these beneficial effects: clearance of amyloid proteins, a hallmark of AD pathology, via the brain's glymphatic system, a recently discovered "plumbing" network parallel to the brain's blood vessels.
"Ever since we published our first results in 2016, people have asked me how does it work? Why 40 Hz? Why not some other frequency?" said study senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and director of The Picower Institute and MIT's Aging Brain Initiative.
"These are indeed very important questions we have worked very hard in the lab to address."
The new paper describes a series of experiments, led by Mitch Murdock when he was a Brain and Cognitive Sciences doctoral student at MIT, showing that when sensory gamma stimulation increases 40 Hz power and synchrony in the brains of mice, that prompts a particular type of neuron to release peptides.
The study results further suggest that those short protein signals then drive specific processes that promote increased amyloid clearance via the glymphatic system.
I just had a look around on the web to see if anyone has produced a page showing what a 40hz light looks like, but the problem is if your screen is 60hz you can't. (A fancier phone than mine with adjustable Hz rate should make it easy, though.)
Still, it's kind of hard to believe that this works, but it appears to on mice at least.
1 comment:
The 40Hz stimulated a memory(think about that😀)
"A gamma wave or gamma rhythm is a pattern of neural oscillation in humans with a frequency between 25 and 140 Hz, the 40 Hz point being of particular interest."
Don't know about rodents but in humans gamma waves are indicative of wide scale activation. The glymphatic system is in part stimulated by blood flow, which increases with neuron activity, and I'd like to know about the implications for the spinal fluid because it's motion also relies to some extent on pulse pressure mediated through a set of connections with the vasculature. The wide scale activation and subsequent blood flow increase stimulates clearance by the glymphatic system.
I'm way too ignorant to fully understand this but I wouldn't write it off.
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