Cerebrospinal fluid
In the rest of the body, blood vessels are shadowed by a system of lymphatic vessels.
Molecules that have served their purpose in the blood move into these fluid-filled tubes and are swept away to the lymph nodes for processing.
But blood vessels in the brain have no such outlet. Several hundred kilometers of them, all told, seem to thread their way through this dense, busily working tissue without a matching waste system.
However, the brain’s blood vessels are surrounded by open, fluid-filled spaces.
In recent decades, the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, in those spaces has drawn a great deal of interest. “Maybe the CSF can be a highway, in a way, for the flow or exchange of different things within the brain,” said Steven Proulx, who studies the CSF system at the University of Bern.
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Empathy recommended