Have you forgotten where you laid your keys? Ever wondered where you had parked your car? Or having trouble remembering the name of the new neighbor? Unfortunately, these things seem to get worse as one gets older. A big question for researchers is where does benign forgetfulness end and true disease begin?
One of the keys to having a healthy brain at any age is having a healthy blood-brain barrier, a complex interface of blood vessels that run through the brain. Researchers reviewed more than 150 articles to look at what happens to the blood-brain barrier as we age. Their findings were published March 15 in Nature Aging.
Whether the changes to the blood-brain barrier alters brain function, however, is still up for debate.
“It turns out very little is known how the blood-brain barrier ages,” said lead author William Banks, a gerontology researcher at the University of Washington…
