The skull has traditionally been regarded largely as armor for the brain. New research from the United States suggests it may have another role: proactively helping to defend what lies beneath it.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis identified previously unknown immune "security stations" in the bone marrow of mouse skulls.
What the mouse experiments revealed
The lymph node-like structures responded to brain tumors before more distant lymph nodes in the neck did. When researchers disrupted the structures in mice with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, the tumors grew faster and the animals died sooner.
"The skull should no longer be viewed simply as a protective shell around the brain," senior study author Jonathan Kipnis told DW.
