A tuberculosis vaccine rarely used in the United States reached the central nervous system of older adults in a small study, providing researchers with direct human evidence for a mechanism behind one of the strangest patterns in dementia research.
Marc Weinberg of Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues ran two related one-year, open-label trials in 23 adults aged 55 and older, 11 with biomarker evidence of Alzheimer's-related pathology and 12 without. Using lumbar puncture to sample cerebrospinal fluid, they showed that the Bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine reaches the brain and alters immune activity there. The work was published in July in Communications Medicine.
