April 30, 2026
By Tristan Horrom
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs - Office of Research and Development - VA Research Communications
VA researchers have discovered a way to flush unwanted proteins and waste products from the brain by using inhaled puffs of specific amounts of carbon dioxide at set intervals, providing a low-impact, easy-to-administer breathing treatment for patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease.
Led by Dr. Henry C. Lin, the New Mexico VA Health Care System team, which included Lin’s research mentees Drs. Sephira Ryman and Andrei Vakhtin, are currently working with VA’s Technology Transfer Program (TTP) to develop a prototype device that can be distributed to administer the breathing treatment for Veterans on a wide scale.
“It becomes a moment of tremendous hope,” said Dr. Lin on the potential of the new treatment, “because these are truly terrifying diseases with no solution right now. Imagine how wonderful it would be to have a new way to help these patients.”
Cases of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have increased exponentially in recent years, with millions of people in the United States having one of these conditions. A unifying feature of neurodegenerative conditions is the accumulation of unwanted proteins in the brain. For Alzheimer’s disease it is amyloid beta and Tau proteins, while for Parkinson’s disease it is alpha synuclein. Related conditions such as Lewy body dementia have a similar protein buildup.
Normally, the body can clear these proteins, which are often the waste products of neuron activity, using a natural process called glymphatic clearance, which takes place when our bodies enter deep sleep. During this process, the brain tells cerebral blood vessels to dilate and constrict, which allows the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the brain to flow deeper into the tissue as interstitial fluid. A cycle of blood vessel dilation and contraction pumps the interstitial fluid through the brain and then back out, flushing potentially harmful proteins, inflammatory mediators, and waste into the blood so the body can clear them out. This process takes place at night, when it will not impact more complex synaptic function, which is also when the brain’s neurons dump out their waste products. Indeed, many scientists believe glymphatic clearance is one of the reasons we need to sleep in the first place.
However, people with neurodegenerative conditions frequently have sleep disorders, while people with sleep disorders are at greater risk of neurodegenerative disorders. This vicious circle impairs the ability of the body to initiate glymphatic clearance.
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