Monday, June 24, 2019

Reading the Research: Leaking Blood-Brain Barriers

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article is a step forward in our ability to test chemical interventions.  While the study itself calls out specific disorders, like Huntington's disease and Parkinson's, the fact is that autistic people also tend to have leaky blood-brain barriers.  

The job of a blood-brain barrier is to screen out toxins, hormones, and neurotransmitters not generated in the brain itself.  This protects the brain's environment so it's not affected by things the liver, kidneys, and other detoxification systems should be handling.  If it leaks, the brain has a much harder time doing its job, and you're more likely to suffer depression, anxiety, fatigue, and brain-specific autoimmune disorders (which includes Parkinson's).  Clear that up, and the autistic person suffers less, which also leads to less difficulty communicating, handling new situations, and managing their life.  

So it seems these scientists were effectively able to grow brand new blood-brain barriers using stem cells from donors.  Like, cells from Person A became new blood-brain barrier with the same defect as Person A's would have inside their body.  That really is science-fiction territory, because you can literally test out drugs on the created blood-brain barrier and figure out which ones have the best chance of helping, on a person-to-person basis.  

That seems to be the idea behind this study and several others this team is working on, given the name of the program: Patient-on-a-Chip.  I can't imagine this sort of thing is going to be cheap, especially in the beginning, but it is potentially highly useful.  Like computer parts, the price will come down as the demand increases and people learn to make the process simpler and more efficient.

I actually have no idea whether the leaky blood-brain barriers that autistic people have are genetically induced or environmentally affected.  It's probably some of both, and I'd bet you could induce environmental changes in a grown blood-brain barrier.  It's just not exactly what they're doing right this moment.  Still, even at this stage in the research, this is pretty cool.  It may well help a lot more than the millions affected by disorders listed in the study.  Perhaps in the future you'll be able to send a sample to a lab, and receive a scientifically rigorous recommendation for anti-depressants, as well as non-chemical interventions to help solidify that barrier.  

(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)

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