Month: September 2022

LONG INCUBATION PERIOD. "Why prion-free guarantees are impossible: the disease has a long incubation period—long enough that an infected person would seem quite healthy and arouse no suspicion among hospital staff. Months can pass—and many patients exposed—before surgeons might learn of a CJD case and pull the tools out of use." 30-40 year incubation periods are generally accepted timeframes. https://lnkd.in/epAib2h View in LinkedIn

AUTOPSY DIAGNOSIS. "Currently, researchers have no way of definitively diagnosing sporadic CJD except by autopsy." https://lnkd.in/epAib2h View in LinkedIn

INFECTION. "New Hampshire health officials announced last week that hospitals in three New England states may have accidentally exposed 15 people to prions, the infectious protein that ravages the brain and leaves it full of holes. Evidently, the hospitals involved used surgical tools that had previously been deployed on a patient who officials suspect later died from a particular prion infection called sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD)." https://lnkd.in/epAib2h View in LinkedIn

IATROGENIC PRION DISEASE. "Between 1970 and 2001, 24 cases of "iatrogenic" CJD (caused by doctors) were recorded in Britain, where the disease was spread during operations or by the use of human-derived hormones or factors. Some scientists believe that the much larger number of cases of "sporadic" CJD in Britain could also be linked to BSE-contaminated instruments." https://lnkd.in/e3kjJMz View in LinkedIn

EVER-PRESENT POSSIBILITY. "The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Presbyterian announced that up to 4,000 patients might have been exposed to the prion. Both incidents show that the hospital transmission of prion diseases remains an ever-present possibility, if thankfully a very unlikely one." (2002). https://lnkd.in/epAib2h View in LinkedIn

"A DESIGNER PROTEIN that "eats" the abnormal prions that cause mad cow disease and variant CJD has been developed at Porton Down which can clean instruments and also offers a new way to dispose of contaminated tissue...the designer enzyme, called MC3, now cuts infectivity by 10,000,000 fold." https://lnkd.in/e3kjJMz View in LinkedIn

CHAPARONES. "Newly made polypeptide chains require the help of molecular chaperones not only to rapidly reach their final three-dimensional forms, but also to unfold and then correctly refold them back to their biologically active form should they misfold. Most prions are an unusual type of protein that can exist in one of two stable conformations, one of which leads to formation of an infectious alternatively folded form." https://lnkd.in/eFH7a_C View in LinkedIn

PRIONS EXPLOIT CHAPARONES. "Studies in Baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) have revealed that prions can exploit the molecular chaperone machinery in the cell in order to ensure stable propagation of the infectious, aggregation-prone form." https://lnkd.in/eFH7a_C View in LinkedIn

PROMISE OF CHAPARONES. "Our results imply that homologs of these chaperones may be active against mammalian prion and amyloid diseases." https://lnkd.in/ep3jFEp View in LinkedIn

NEURODEGENERATIVE PRION DISEASES. "Increasing evidence argues that prions cause many neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Creutzfeldt-Jacob, and Lou Gehrig's diseases, as well as tauopathies. The majority of NDs are sporadic, and 10% to 20% are inherited. Some mammalian prions perform vital functions and do not cause disease." https://lnkd.in/e5DP4zX View in LinkedIn