Blood Brain Barrier

Blood Brain Barrier (BBB)

The Blood Brain Barrier is both a fascinating feature our body has, yet it’s somewhat complicated to grasp, only because there is just so much to go over and learn from just that part. This link will lead you to a video that discusses what would break down the blood brain barrier. Just from this two minute video I was surprised to learn the different disease or attacks like a stroke could break down the barrier. This link will lead explain a few things on the BBB and what breaks it down  BBB

Our brain is permeated by a large network of capillaries (small blood vessels), and those capillaries are then surrounded by another layer of cells. The barrier we are talking about is a fancy phrase to say that we are looking at the endothelial cells since that is what it’s mainly composed of. When looking at the blood brain barrier, and seeing what it does, how it works, why it does what it does, it should be safe to say that this barrier has many functions.  I got really into this subject so I really dug deep and found a lot of information especially a video that expands the BBB that I thought would.


Dr. William Banks, Professor of Internal Medicine and Professor Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, made a very interesting video discussing the brain and went into a deeper level of the BBB. I learned a lot from him, it's a pretty long video but trust me it's worth watching, here's the link BBB


The way I see the BBB functions judging from what I heard and read, the cell membranes contain transport proteins that decide who gets to pass and who doesn’t. Kind of like bouncers at a club if you think about it that way, it'll make sense. Our BBB is important because if we didn’t have this barrier then unwanted molecules, or harmful substances like toxins can do as they please and I highly doubt any of us would want that to happen. I find it fascinating though, to have learned that the BBB is not just a barrier, but it has the ability to bring in other mechanisms to kick out those harmful substances as soon as they had passed.Which brings me back to the whole bouncer at a club scenario.
Our BBB allows certain mechanisms to help bring in certain type of substances in. To name a few, the BBB allows Glucose to pass, because it’s part of our energy source, without it we probably wouldn’t have energy to do anything. Oxygen is allowed to pass through the barrier, because if we didn’t have oxygen we’ll die. The video above that I mentioned earlier by Dr. William Banks discusses this as well.
What I found especially interesting is the different things that can break down the BBB. Feeding Hormones, Obesity, Leptin Resistance, Alzheimer’s disease, Abeta Protein Efflux can break down the barrier as we get older. For Obesity, there would probably have to be something in the blood to have made someone obese. Experiments with lab rats have studied this by tying the circulatory systems of a fat and thin mouse together so that they were virtually the same, and found that  if something was missing from the blood then the obese mouse would turn thin, which ended up happening. Laptin (fat cells) are able to pass through the BBB.
There is a lot of information and way too many components of the BBB to go into much detail, but all in all the BBB is a tight barrier formed to protect the brain from harmful compounds. Even though it plays an important part of the CNS (Central Nervous System) the barrier makes delivering prescribed drugs to the brain hard. That could probably happen because the BBB has a hard time telling apart which is good to pass the barrier and what is not okay to pass the barrier so that is probably why.

 As for Alzheimer's disease, that is especially personal to me, since my grandmother suffered from Alzheimer's for a few years before she passed away, and now my uncle is slowly getting Alzheimer's presently. Usually Alzheimer's kicks in around mid sixties and up, my grandmother started showing symptoms of Alzheimer's when she turned 80 years old, she passed away at age 89. As for my uncle he's slowly starting to forget things and he can't remember things that previously happened that much either. People with Alzheimer's they don't have the same amount of neurotransmitters as we do, because of this something develops that causes cells to not work properly and thus causing signal transportation really hard, but it takes a lot of time for that to happen.  Since that disruptions happens, I would think that because the BBB is slowly breaking down in this case, that is how someone gets Alzheimer's disease. 
 It’s truly a fascinating subject, but there are way too many components to go over, but the video by Dr. Banks is a great video to understand the BBB I encourage everyone to go and look at it if you have trouble understanding the BBB.  

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