Fibrinogen is neurotoxic to neurons and oligodendrocytes, contributing to white matter disease.

“in fact um you know so work from uh Dr Montaine has shown that fibrinogen which is you and I are familiar with this protein it's something if you are measuring your if you're doing an inflammatory biomarker panel right I mean so so that's it's it's an it's it's a protein that's involved in blood coagulation but it's also something that is a marker of inflammation you know and fibrinogen is not supposed to be in the brain but it's found in the brain in people with a leaky bloodb brain barrier”

“and not only um so what's it doing in there it disrupts a cell type called oligodendrocytes these are a cell type that make mile um that sort of fatty white structure that's uh important for you know electric signals being uh fired throughout the you know brain and it it's basically toxic to them so you basically start to have these you know lesions and stuff in the white matter part of the brain white matter hyperintensities as you're probably very familiar with very common in um small vessel disease also you can see that in in people with Alzheimer's as well”

“fibrinogen might play a role in this formation of white matter uh disease so yes it's a very important protein that we found”

“and it's toxic it's just toxic and we found that it's neurotoxic so toxic to neurons it's also toxic to oligodendrocytes”

“the oligos are very sensitive to that to that fibrinogen so they take it up so the internalized fabinogen and they die by what we call autophagy so it's almost like a suicide cancer test and which leads to white metal disease”