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tricky | 3 years ago

Magnetic resonance focused high intensity ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in humans to deliver drugs directly to brain tissue - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12426-9

discuss

Static2280|3 years ago

This is interesting to me because my mother has MS and it's _because_ the blood-brain barrier is too open that she has health issues. Surprising there's good reason to open it up.

tricky|3 years ago

I learned about this from a talk given by one of the authors. The guy next to me asked, "If you open up the blood-brain barrier, doesn't that mean nasty things can cross, too?" and the author was like, "yep." There are definitely risks.

monknomo|3 years ago

It's an interesting problem - I was reading about bipolar, which also (probably) has the issue of too open a blood-brain barrier. There is a theory that repairing the blood-brain barrier would help, but as drugs repair the barrier, it's harder to get drugs into the brain from the blood, which means the doses need to be higher, which means the side effects are worse.

I could imagine a treatment protocol of opening the blood-brain barrier and then administering a low dose of a drug, or something along those lines

lofatdairy|3 years ago

I'm aware that Elisa Konofagou at Columbia has done quite a bit of work on this in the past decade if your interested in more:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4038976/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030156290...

O__________O|3 years ago