As our body’s central control center, the brain has to keep going at all costs. It makes sense that it’s surrounded by biological safeguards: a bony skull, a sack of tissue, and blood vessels that filter out most infectious bugs. When neurons start to decline—as some do naturally with age—the brain can even quickly rewire networks before we notice anything is amiss. But these same safeguards are a huge obstacle for scientists trying to study the brain’s decline—specifically dementia. Grey matter is excellent at adapting to the slow buildup of abnormal proteins, the cause of several forms of dementia , and it lacks the same pain receptors as the rest of our body. So by the time a patient starts becoming forgetful, or having trouble concentrating, the cellular damage is already substantial—and usually irreversible. In order to slow or prevent dementia, scientists will have to be able to spot it before cognitive systems collapse. Current diagnostic tools for Alzheimer’s, the most com...
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