Ian F Harrison1, Asif Machhada1, Niall Colgan1, Ozama Ismail1, James M O'Callaghan1, Holly E Holmes1, Jack A Wells1, Alexander V Gourine2, Tracey K Murray3, Zeshan Ahmed3, Ross A Johnson4, Emily C Collins4, Michael J O'Neill3, and Mark F Lythgoe1
1Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 2Department of Neuroscience, Physiology & Pharmacology, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 3Eli Lilly and Company, Windlesham, United Kingdom, 4Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN, United States
The
‘glymphatic’ clearance system is a brain-wide pathway for removal of waste solutes
from the brain. It has recently been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD),
due to discovery that both amyloid and tau, accumulations of which lead to AD
development, can be cleared from the brain via this pathway. We therefore hypothesise
that an impairment of ‘glymphatic’ clearance occurs in the initial stages of
disease development, leading to accumulation of amyloid and tau in the brain. Here,
we determine whether this is the case, by using dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI to
quantify glymphatic clearance in the brain of a mouse model of AD.
