First Mouse Model To Study Important Aspect Of Alzheimer'sHirano bodies are almost indescribably tiny objects found in nerve cells of people suffering from conditions such as Alzheimer's, mad cow and Lou Gehrig's diseases. Yet for decades, researchers weren't sure if these structures helped cause the conditions or appeared after onset of the disease and had some other role...
Cellular Stress Can Induce Yeast To Promote Prion FormationIt's a chicken and egg question. Where do the infectious protein particles called prions come from? Essentially clumps of misfolded proteins, prions cause neurodegenerative disorders, such as mad cow/Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, in humans and animals. Prions trigger the misfolding and aggregation of their properly folded protein counterparts, but they usually need some kind of "seed" to get started...
Tracking Down BSE And Creutzfeldt-Jakob DiseasePrion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle are transmissible neurodegenerative diseases linked to the aggregation of the prion protein in the central nervous system. It is known that the aggregation of prion proteins promotes neuronal decay with fatal consequences for the infected individual...
Rinderpest Is Dead; Second Disease In History Declared EradicatedThe Romans couldn't beat it when they ruled the world, but today in Rome the UN has declared the eradication of rinderpest, the second disease in all of human history to be successfully wiped out after smallpox. Scientists are celebrating victory over a deadly animal disease that cattle herders around the world have dreaded for millennia...
Drugs Being Developed To Tackle CJD Could Also Help Prevent Alzheimer'sScientists funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) have identified two antibodies which could help block the onset of Alzheimer's disease in the brain. The antibodies, ICSM-18 and ICSM-35, were already known to play a crucial role in preventing 'protein misfolding', the main cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), the human form of mad cow disease...
Fast, Sensitive Blood Test For Human Prion DiseaseWHAT: Scientists from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), report that they have developed a method -10,000 times more sensitive than other methods - to detect variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (vCJD) in blood plasma. vCJD is a type of prion disease in humans that leads to brain damage and death...
STERIS Pioneers Prion Decontamination TechnologiesFollowing recent patient safety alerts, prion diseases - such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and variant CJD (vCJD) - are of increasing concern within the healthcare environment, as their causative agents can be extremely resistant to the cleaning, disinfection and sterilization methods currently used in many hospitals...
Canadian Blood Services To Expand Deferral Policy For vCJDCanadian Blood Services is expanding its deferral policy for vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt -Jakob disease) policy to include Saudi Arabia. A new question will be added to the Record of Donation donor questionnaire asking each donor if he or she has spent a cumulative total of six months or more in Saudi Arabia between 1980 and 1996...
New Research Focuses On Prion Diseases New research by Chongsuk Ryou, researcher at the UK Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics in the UK College of Medicine, may shed light on possible treatments for prion diseases...
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