The Glymphatic System – A Beginner's Guide

By Nadia Aalling Jessen, Anne Sofie Finmann Munk, I. Lundgaard, Maiken Nedergaard. Neurochemical Research, 2015

1,801 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The glymphatic system is a recently discovered macroscopic waste clearance system that utilizes a unique system of perivascular tunnels, formed by astroglial cells, to promote efficient elimination of soluble proteins and metabolites from the central nervous system. Besides waste elimination, the glymphatic system also facilitates brain-wide distribution of several compounds, including glucose, lipids, amino acids, growth factors, and neuromodulators. Intriguingly, the glymphatic system function mainly during sleep and is largely disengaged during wakefulness. The biological need for sleep across all species may therefore reflect that the brain must enter a state of activity that enables elimination of potentially neurotoxic waste products, including β-amyloid. Since the concept of the glymphatic system is relatively new, we will here review its basic structural elements, organization, regulation, and functions. We will also discuss recent studies indicating that glymphatic function is suppressed in various diseases and that failure of glymphatic function in turn might contribute to pathology in neurodegenerative disorders, traumatic brain injury and stroke.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Epidemiology, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5265d174e6e3870c2a98775e7a01c698671b91f3

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

1. S. Vatnehol
2. Geir Ringstad
3. W. Klein
4. P. Eide
5. Nava Zisapel
6. K. Viola

In Neurology

1. S. Vatnehol
2. Geir Ringstad
3. P. Eide

Citations in the corpus

• New perspectives on the role of melatonin in human sleep, circadian rhythms and their regulation (2018, background): “An alternative mechanism linking sleep and Aβ has been recently suggested (Mendelsohn and Larrick, 2013), whereby sleep can facilitate the removal of toxic proteins and othermolecules from the brain through regulation of the ‘glymphatic’ system (Jessen et al., 2015).”
• The Amyloid-β Oligomer Hypothesis: Beginning of the Third Decade (2018, background): “The recently discovered glymphatic system functions to remove metabolic waste, including soluble proteins, from the CNS [360].”
• Glymphatic MRI in idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (2017, background): “By administration of an intrathecal contrast agent at the lumbar level, ‘glymphatic MRI’ may thereby bridge the gap from animal studies to investigations of glymphatic clearance of solutes from the human brain interstitial space (Jessen et al., 2015).”