Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
My name is Roxana Carare.
I'm a professor of
clinical neuroanatomy in
the University of
Southampton in the UK,
and my area of
expertise is the drainage
of fluids from the brain.
Today I'm going to be
talking to you about
the lymphatic drainage
of the brain.
0:20
Every other organ in
the body apart from
the brain has traditional
lymphatic vessels,
so these are large diameter
vessels that collect
fluid and waste
metabolites and cells from
the tissues to return them
to the venous system.
The brain and the eye do
not have traditional
lymphatic vessels,
so in order to better
understand what the
lymphatic drainage
of the brain is like,
we need to recap and consider
what fluids exist
within the skull.
1:07
In the skull is the
brain parenchyma,
and there are three fluids,
one is blood, another one
is cerebrospinal fluid,
and the third one is the
interstitial fluid that
occupies the spaces between
the cells, so the
extracellular spaces.
The major mechanisms
of clearance
of fluid and solutes
from the CNS are
by absorption into
the blood or by
drainage of the
cerebrospinal fluid
to the blood and lymph nodes,
and then again to the blood.
The interstitial fluid drains
to lymph nodes and to the blood.
There is also uptake of solutes
by cells of the CNS, of the
central nervous system,
for example, by microglia
or astrocytes and
that leads to
intracellular degradation.
Or there can be
enzymatic degradation of
extracellular solutes within
the brain parenchyma tissue.
