Is the Aging Hippocampus Particularly Vulnerable to Blood-Brain Barrier Dysfunction?

The hippocampus in the brain is vital to cognitive functions involving learning and memory. In today's open access paper, researchers review the evidence for the hippocampus to be particularly vulnerable to damaging mechanisms, including those involved in aging. It is tentatively suggested that physiological and biochemical differences in the hippocampus point to a greater fragility of the hippocampal blood-brain barrier as a common thread underlying pathological changes observed in aging and Alzheimer's disease. The blood-brain barrier is a specialized layer of cells that wrap blood vessels passing through the central nervous system. Its purpose is to restrict traffic of molecules and cells between the bloodstream and the brain, to maintain the brain's comparative isolation from much of the biochemistry of the rest of the body. It is well established that the blood-brain barrier becomes dysfunctional in later life, as is the case for all other complex structures in the body. It leaks, allowing cells and molecules into the brain to cause local inflammatory reactions and other damage. The causes of this leakage are a complex web of interactions stretching from fundamental mechanisms of aging through changes in gene expression and altered cell behavior. As for the rest of aging, there is no good map to link what is known of the root causes of aging to what is known of the way in which cells in the blood-brain barrier become dysfunctional. This is why many in the communit...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs