'If you damage the lining of the nose, you can increase how many bacteria can go up into your brain.'
Picking your nose might seem harmless albeit gross, but new research is showing it may have some devastating consequences,The new research demonstrates that a bacteria can travel through the olfactory nerve in the nose and into the brain in mice, where it creates markers that are a tell-tale sign of Alzheimer's disease.
Professor James St John, Head of the Clem Jones Center for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research, is a co-author of the new research he says is a world first."We're the first to show that Chlamydia pneumoniae can go directly up the nose and into the brain where it can set off pathologies that look like Alzheimer's disease," St John said. "We saw this happen in a mouse model, and the evidence is potentially scary for humans as well.
Now, the team just needs to prove that the same pathway exists in humans and can be used in the same fashion by"We need to do this study in humans and confirm whether the same pathway operates in the same way. It's research that has been proposed by many people, but not yet completed. What we do know is that these same bacteria are present in humans, but we haven't worked out how they get there.