IF YOU personal a automobile, you should have seen the engine getting much less environment friendly with time. The additional you drive it, the extra gasoline it takes to make the identical journey – till, finally, it turns into so underpowered that it wants a bodily push to climb even a mild hill.

Now, it’s rising that a lot the identical is true of the human mind. Microscopic buildings referred to as mitochondria, present in each mind cell, are fairly actually the engines of our ideas and emotions. As we age, they discover it more durable and more durable to supply ample vitality to energy our psychological actions. Worse, in the same technique to an previous automobile leaving clouds of smoke in its wake, the cell’s powerhouses begin producing undesirable waste merchandise that slowly poison our brains. Which means that malfunctioning mitochondria could underlie lots of the most devastating mind situations, together with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and motor neuron illness.

In response to this “grand unified principle” of neurodegeneration, we might lengthen our mind’s wholesome functioning by recharging our neurons by means of restoration of their powerhouses. The thought is already inspiring some thrilling new therapies for age-related mind situations, with a number of drug candidates beneath investigation. Some researchers are even exploring the potential of transplanting wholesome mitochondria into broken, ageing brains to re-energise them. “Should you preserve altering the components of a automobile, it might probably final ceaselessly,” says Claudio Soto, a neurologist on the College of Texas Well being Science Middle at Houston. “So what occurs if we attempt to do the…