Can a novel way to get antibodies into the brain help Alzheimer’s disease? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Something called the blood brain barrier prevents many things, including most drugs, from entering your brain. Now a new study that disrupts the barrier using ultrasound seems to have shown that antibodies to treat Alzheimer’s disease can gain entry this way. Geriatrics expert Lolita Nidadavolu at Johns Hopkins says she has concerns.

Nidadavolu: With aging there is disruption, there's some kind of leakage between the blood and the brain just with aging anyways, and so that's one of the reasons why we see some of these blood based biomarkers that are able to detect dementia, like a beta, P Tau 218,things like that we're able to detect them in the bloodstream because of this penetration in that once impenetrable layer that's there for the blood brain barrier.    :28 

Nidadavolu says consequences of disrupting the barrier further aren’t known and must be further studied. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.