What I’ll be doing to help detox my brain in the new year
We have only just started to understand how our brains clean themselves, but columnist Helen Thomson finds promising evidence for how to boost this process
When neurons are active in your brain they create waste products
Nick Veasey/Science Photo Library/Alamy
As we enjoy ourselves through the festive season, many will already be planning a detox in the new year: cutting back on screentime, perhaps, or abstaining from alcohol. Recently, I wondered whether you could apply the same logic to the brain – is there anything I can do once the fun is over to help clear away my cognitive cobwebs?
In fact, the brain performs its own kind of detox every day – clearing out the waste products generated by metabolism that would otherwise build up and cause damage. But can we help this process along? And if so, might that protect us from age-related cognitive decline and dementia?
Let’s start by meeting the brain’s cleaning crew, beginning with the glymphatic system. This relatively recently discovered waste-removal pathway “sucks out” unwanted proteins and other waste debris from the spaces between your neurons and transports it to the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).
“The CSF circulates much like water in a dishwasher,” says Maha Alattar at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
The fluid then discharges the waste products into your lymph nodes and from there to the veins, before they are eventually excreted from your body.
How the glymphatic and lymphatic systems connect isn’t particularly well understood, but researchers are increasingly interested in how to optimise the glymphatic system’s efficiency because they think it might prove important for preventing cognitive decline and sustaining healthy ageing. This is in part because a build-up of metabolic waste in the brain is associated with poorer cognitive health, increased risk of dementia and accelerated symptoms of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
“The glymphatic system is exciting,” says Nandakumar Narayanan at University of Iowa Health Care. “There are lots of great ideas and research efforts to understand the glymphatic system, measure it rigorously, and use these measurements to better understand human health and disease.”
Boosting your brain’s waste removal system
So can we do anything to make this waste removal system run more efficiently? Recent studies have hinted that lifestyle factors may be our best tools.