Best Post of October 2013: New Study Suggests "Glymphatic System" Flushes Brain of Toxins During Sleep

The next in our "Best of the Month Series comes from a post that appeared on October 22, 2013. Since this posting, The New York Times has picked up on this topic. Perhaps they read it here first? In any case, it's a post worth re-posting:

A new study published in the journal Science on Thursday and reported in the Washington Post suggests that a so-called "glymphatic system" seems capable of flushing toxins (including perhaps  beta-amyloid) from brain -- particularly during sleep.“Sleep puts the brain in another state where we clean out all the byproducts of activity during the daytime,” said study author and University of Rochester neurosurgeon Maiken Nedergaard.
(Thanks to avid NP Blog reader and friend, Dr. Doug Shevlin, for alerting me to this significant new finding.)