I’m really excited about all these studies lately. Lots of work has been going on to chip away at these problems and it really feels like we’re at the cusp of resolving a lot of brain issues. The blood brain barrier isn’t exactly as impervious as once believed according to another study I ran across. They used ultrasonic pulses to widen the openings and deliver that controversial tau protein drug and resolved a patients tremors in about an hour or two.
It’s wonderful to see that we’re making progress, but honestly this sort of thing reminds me how crude our understanding really is. It’s a bit scary this wasn’t already known, ie that the blood brain barrier wasn’t understood well enough for someone to come up with the study’s hypothesis. The fact that we’re still finding low hanging fruit like this makes me worry that we don’t really have the technology to be dealing with brain issues on a fine grained level, and that it’ll be many decades before we do.
What a time to be alive!