(Press-News.org) A new study led by investigators from Mass General Brigham shows that a brain waste- “clean-up” system is influenced by intracranial pressure. The system, called the glymphatic system, was unrecognized until 2012 and helps circulate fluid and remove waste from the brain. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the research team found that changes in this fluid flow may help doctors better diagnose intracranial hypertension (IIH) less invasively and more reliably than with standard approaches currently used. Their results are published in the Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology.
When the pressure inside the skull is too high, but doctors cannot find another cause, they diagnose IIH. IIH is an increasingly recognized condition characterized by symptoms including headaches, vision loss, and pulsatile tinnitus that is more common in women between the ages of 15 and 45 with higher body weight. If the intracranial pressure stays high, it can damage the optic nerves.
“IIH is becoming more common, but it is difficult to diagnose, and it can lead to permanent vision loss. That combination makes the need for better diagnostic tools especially important,” said lead study author Marc Bouffard, MD, a neuro-ophthalmologist at Mass Eye and Ear, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system. “Our research points to a noninvasive test that could help us more reliably and objectively diagnose it.”
This research is part of the IIH Research and Treatment Initiative, a new program launched at Mass General Brigham focused on understanding IIH, improving diagnosis, and finding new treatment options. The initiative is led by members of Mass General Brigham’s Department of Neurology, including Dr. Bouffard, Robert Mallery, MD, and Bart Chwalisz, MD. Their team brings together clinical care and research to understand what causes IIH and develop new treatments for it.
Their latest study investigates the role of the glymphatic system in IIH. Using an MRI brain scan analysis called DTI-ALPS (diffusion tensor imaging analysis along the perivascular space), the researchers measured how easily fluid moves along the spaces surrounding blood vessels in the brain — key pathways for the glymphatic system.
Mass General Brigham researchers, in conjunction with collaborators from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical, derived ALPS indices from MRI scans of 40 adults. These included people at every stage of IIH and healthy volunteers. The study revealed changes in glymphatic activity depending on the stage of IIH. Glymphatic activity was lower in people with recent-onset IIH, higher in those with long-standing untreated IIH, and normal in people with well-controlled IIH. The changes they observed may resolve after IIH is cured.
“It has been hypothesized – by us and others – that glymphatic dysfunction might cause IIH, but if that were true we would expect to see an inverse relationship between glymphatic transit and intracranial pressure. Instead, what we found suggests glymphatic changes are more likely influenced by high pressure inside the head with changes that could be adaptive. These findings help to shape and update thinking about the recently recognized glymphatic system’s role in this enigmatic disease” Bouffard said.
The researchers believe that ALPS-indices or other measures of glymphatic activity could be used to diagnose IIH noninvasively. They note a study limitation is that the results describe a single dimension of glymphatic flow, and they are planning studies to incorporate MRI indices to define the glymphatic system’s activity in a more comprehensive manner, imaging arterial pulsation and cerebrospinal fluid transit.
Their group is also preparing future studies, including clinical trials, to test new treatment strategies and reduce the burden of symptoms for people with IIH.
“These patients have a lot of burdensome symptoms. Current treatments are hard to tolerate and can have a lot of side effects,” said Mallery, who is also an attending neuro-ophthalmologist in the Mass General Brigham Department of Neurology. “By learning more about the mechanisms of the disease, we hope to identify and develop better treatments for IIH.”
Authorship: In addition to Bouffard, Mallery and Chwalisz, study co-authors include Donnella S. Comeau, Mahsa Alborzi Avanaki, Narjes Jaafar, Alexander Brook, Bardia Abbasi, David C. Alsop, Yu-Ming Chang, Joseph F. Rizzo, Katherine L. Reinshagen, Olivia Grech, and Jeremy N. Ford.
Disclosures: The authors have no relevant disclosures.
Funding: This work was funded with philanthropic support to the Departments of Neurology at Mass General Brigham and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Paper cited: Bouffard, M et al. “Perivascular diffusivity suggests dynamic and modifiable glymphatic transit in idiopathic intracranial hypertension” Journal of Neuro-Ophthalmology DOI: 10.1097/WNO.0000000000002434
###
About Mass General Brigham
Mass General Brigham is an integrated academic health care system, uniting great minds to solve the hardest problems in medicine for our communities and the world. Mass General Brigham connects a full continuum of care across a system of academic medical centers, community and specialty hospitals, a health insurance plan, physician networks, community health centers, home care, and long-term care services. Mass General Brigham is a nonprofit organization committed to patient care, research, teaching, and service to the community. In addition, Mass General Brigham is one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations with several Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. For more information, please visit massgeneralbrigham.org.
END
LAWRENCE — Researchers at the University of Kansas have shown the National Severe Storms Laboratory’s Warn-on-Forecast System(WoFS) has potential to help weather forecasters issue warnings to emergency managers and the general public well before tornado formation. Their study appears in the peer-reviewed journal Weather and Forecasting.
The current lead time on issuing tornado warnings is about 15 minutes. The difference could save lives and property across the Great Plains (the classic ...
Dario Fiore, research professor at IMDEA Software, has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) grant by the European Research Council. This funding scheme is designed to help translate high-level scientific results into applications with social and industrial impact and is exclusively available to researchers who have previously led ERC-funded projects.
The awarded project has a budget of €150,000 and a duration of 18 months, and will focus on one of the major challenges in digital technology today: ensuring both privacy and reliability in cloud-based machine learning services.
The project, ...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2026 — Concrete structures like roads and bridges require nondestructive testing methods to identify interior defects without destroying their structure. Most methods send sound waves into the material and capture the waves that echo back to create images of what’s inside and find defects. This process is similar to ultrasounds used to see inside the human body.
But unlike human tissues, concrete contains a diversity of materials, including stone, clay, chalk, slate, iron ore, and sand, that scatter sound waves and make clear imaging difficult to obtain.
In an article in Applied Physics ...
A newly excavated archaeological site in central China is reshaping long-held assumptions about early hominin behaviour in Eastern Asia.
Led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers conducted archaeological excavations at Xigou, located in the Danjiangkou Reservoir Region in central China, uncovering evidence of advanced stone tool technologies dating back 160,000-72,000 years ago.
The explorations, co-led by Griffith University, revealed hominins in this region were far more inventive and adaptable than previously believed, at a time when multiple large-brained ...
About The Study: The findings of this cohort study suggest that Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act was associated with lower overall mortality among women ages 40 to 64 with breast cancer. Benefits were uneven, underscoring persistent racial and ethnic and socioeconomic disparities and the need for targeted interventions.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Chioma Ekwunazu, BS, email chioma.ekwunazu@bison.howard.edu.
To access the embargoed study: Visit ...
About The Study: This trial demonstrated acupuncture’s efficacy for migraine without aura pain relief and functional improvement. Connectome-based predictive modeling identified default mode network and subcortical cerebellum hypoconnectivity as predicting pain relief and subcortical-cerebellum-motor hyperconnectivity as predicting reduced disability, providing a personalized treatment framework.
Corresponding Author: To contact the corresponding author, Lu Liu, PhD, email lululalavictor1985@126.com.
To ...
University of Liverpool researchers have discovered a way to host some of the most significant properties of graphene in a three‑dimensional (3D) material, potentially removing the hurdles for these properties to be used at scale in green computing.
Graphene is famous for being incredibly strong, lightweight, and an excellent conductor of electricity and its applications range from electronics to aerospace and medical technologies. However, its two-dimensional (2D) structure makes it mechanically fragile and limits its use in demanding environments and large-scale applications.
In a paper published today, a team of researchers have identified that 3D material, HfSn₂, ...
An international research team has uncovered evidence of advanced stone tool technologies in East Asia dating back 160,000 to 72,000 years, with the findings recently published in Nature Communications.
Led by the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the team—which included researchers from China, Australia, Spain, and the United States—conducted multidisciplinary archaeological investigations at the Xigou site in the Danjiangkou Reservoir ...
Sunbeams contain a lot of energy. But current technology for harvesting solar power doesn’t capture as much as it could. Now, in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, researchers report that gold nanospheres, named supraballs, can absorb nearly all wavelengths in sunlight — including some that traditional photovoltaic materials miss. Applying a layer of supraballs onto a commercially available electricity converter demonstrated that the technology nearly doubled solar energy absorption compared to traditional materials.
Scientists are exploring materials that absorb light ...
Research by an interdisciplinary team from McGill University and Université Laval provides new insights into the links between social factors and cognitive health among aging adults.
While previous research had found positive correlations between specific measures of social connectedness and a variety of health outcomes, this study appears to have been the first to create profiles aggregating multiple social factors and to see how those correlated with cognitive health in older adults, the researchers said.
The team derived three social environment ...
