The paper can be found in Nature here:<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14432.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...</a>
tl;dr lymphatic nodes go all the way up the back of your brain and into your sinuses. We'd been ripping them out and throwing them away every time we did autopsies or dissections because they were attached to the inside of the skull. Oops.
I'm not a doctor or neuroscientist, but this strikes me as a significant find if I'm understanding it correctly, right? "We were pretty sure the lymphatic system doesn't directly connect to the brain. Well we were wrong, (points) there it is."
So I have MS. I go to any link that has to do with the Immune system. Recently I see tons of "discoveries" and attempts to link it to MS. Which gets me excited but than I start to think how much of this is truth and how much is bullshit? Or that MS and others like it are so complex that all of the findings are true... Either way starting to have a hard time finding hope in any of these articles.
How they discovered it:<p>> The vessels were detected after Louveau developed a method to mount a mouse’s meninges – the membranes covering the brain – on a single slide so that they could be examined as a whole. “It was fairly easy, actually,” he said. “There was one trick: We fixed the meninges within the skullcap, so that the tissue is secured in its physiological condition, and then we dissected it."<p>Can someone explain what it means to fix the meninges to the skullcap? Do they mean they attached it to the skull bone? How then do they mount a curved bone to a slide?
Awesome finding, I hope it is confirmed soon. Many neurodegenerative diseases are known to involve an immune component, but how that might occur has been a mystery.<p>It has very significant implications for diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease (aka Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS), multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, etc.
> "treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s"<p>It upsets me that the author keep referring autism as a disease. A high functioning autistic would be very offended if you say that their way of thinking is a disease.<p>Note to the downvoters: A developmental range of disorders is not a disease. If you don't agree you are invited to comment.
While is very interesting, from what I can see the research was done in mice not humans.<p>The diagram of the "new" human lymphatic system is in the press release not the research paper.<p>I do recognise the value of animal models in research, and this is intriguing, but with tempering with a little caution.
Connection between autism and immune system potentially found, further study needed to determine the specifics.<p>The anti-vaxers are going to have a field day with all this gray area to sow misinformation into.
Thanks to the HN comments which assured that it is important. Otherwise after reading the first sentence and processing it with standard sensational filtering regex of my brain, I wouldn't have proceeded forward.<p>"In a [stunning|amazing] discovery that overturns [years|decades|centuries] of [textbook teaching|beliefs|research] [researchers|scientists] at the <XYZ Lab> have discovered that the <PQR premise> holds false."
Well ... it's great that finally the physiological structures of this connection are unveiled, but it's been known for a long time that you can measurably positively affect your immune system by means of meditation which is a mental process.
Self-promotion is suspect in this highly competitive, and not infrequently nasty field. It was known that there was some transport mechanism--now there are details. But I would caution some skepticism, especially when the discoverer trumpets the extraordinary significance of the discovery.
I wonder if I will be alive if they ever figure out how the Placebo Effect works? With discoveries like this--maybe? I always used the Placebo Effect as the existence of a God. I will probally be proved wrong by science, if God decides to give me a few years? (Yes, I have faith. I am probably delusional? It helps me get through the day. I don't want to offend atheists? So, please don't hammer me.)