Published May 27, 2026, 1:57 PM EDT
The underlying idea is striking in its simplicity.
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Published May 27, 2026, 1:57 PM EDT
When Vietnam-era veterans develop Parkinson’s disease, the Department of Veterans Affairs attributes it to Agent Orange exposure. Now, thanks to new VA-funded research, they and other veterans who face elevated risks of neurodegenerative diseases could have a clue to a future treatment — one that doesn’t involve drugs. Your brain has a waste disposal system. It works best when you’re in deep sleep, pumping cerebrospinal fluid through brain tissue to carry away toxic proteins that build up during the day. When that system breaks down, those proteins accumulate. In Parkinson’s disease, clumps of a misfolded protein called alpha-synuclein build up in brain cells and destroy them. In Alzheimer’s, it is amyloid-beta and tau. The waste clearance system, called the glymphatic pathway, is supposed to prevent that. In people with Parkinson’s, it often does not work well enough, in part because the disease disrupts the deep sleep the system depends on. Now, a team of researchers funded by the New Mexico VA Health Care System, the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and the Mind Research Network has found a way to turn that system on while patients are wide awake, using nothing more than carefully timed pulses of carbon dioxide.
