Beyond headlines of transmitted Alzheimer's, scientists see case for prions
fiercebiotech.com
fiercebiotech.com
I'm currently under investigation of early-onset dementia due to significant cognitive decline in the last year or so with the earliest of symptoms being noticed about 6 years ago. This topic is particularly interesting because I had a cervical spine fusion 6 years ago with a cadaver bone used from an elderly patient. That was the beginning of my journey in hell. It seems extremely unlikely that was a route for transmitting anything to me, but nevertheless the topic posed in this article and the underlying reference articles makes me wonder. If anything, I'm grateful that it's being looked at more closely.
I know this is a shot in the dark, I posted this the other day. There's a correlation between poor oral hygiene and dementia/Alzheimer's.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/good-oral-healt...
My dad had an infection in his teeth and died with cognitive decline.
The infection isn't always visible, even with a standard X-ray from the dentist.
You'll want to get a "cone CT scan". Not every dentistry will have this equipment. But it's your best bet for finding a festering, chronic dental inflammation.
We need more effective easily accessible solutions
I have felt a bit paranoid it's happening to me but I'm not sure how to be sure.
It's important to emphasize this may not be dementia, and could be something else entirely like hormones, liver, thyroid, or other neurological problems that mimic the symptoms of dementia/alzheimers. That being said, dementia is what my doctor has sent me to a neurologist for and what we're testing for.
For what it's worth, my dad got a form of dementia and the hallucinations weren't part of it. It was more just forgetting things that he had always known, like the road network around where I grew up. My mom said he would call sometimes and say he couldn't remember how to get home from places where he had been many times. Also just a change in affect overall which wasn't obvious at the time, because of how gradual it happened, but later was very obvious in retrospect.
The hGH was inadequately purified. It seems likely to have contained multiple different contaminants.
Goodness! 200 out of 1800 subjects developing CJD is the scariest thing I saw in that study. It isn't many folds away from being an extinction level threat. Makes me worry about exponentially rising compute capability.
> Either way, it is completely irrelevant for normal people, unless you eat squirrel brains or ground up beef imported from Britain in the 90s.
Most cases of CJD we see are sporadic CJD. It's rare, but also the scariest struggle I've ever seen.
In my opinion, our industrialization of the food supply will lead to mass prion distribution/infection at some point.
I'm not trying to downplay the threat and incredible difficulty of preventing known prion diseases, particularly with regards to destroying the infectious prions. However, to illustrate the rarity of the phenomenon on a per-protein basis, consider how the processes involved in cooking have themselves been denaturing (i.e. mifolding) an unimaginable number of all kinds of proteins in a myriad of ways all since human prehistory, and yet we have no known examples nor even hints of new prions having been created in the process.
Through processed foods, an apex predator like humanity comes into contact with proteins from several orders magnitude more animals than our ancient hunter gatherers or farmers. This problem is compounded as our livestock eat processed foods themselves.
Perhaps prions were not as dangerous for most of evolutionary history as they simply lacked a distribution vector?
My grandmother was from "the old country" and would never allow us to buy ground meat in a package. She made us ask the deli to grind her selected cuts, in front of her.
Back then, I wrote this off as some kind of old world silliness. I remember being embarrassed about the whole kerfuffle.
I know she wasn't thinking of prions, just contamination in general.
Now I realize that I was the silly one, and she was very wise.
Also they don't can't sterilize the grinder between customers so doubt it does much for hygiene.
This is very common around here.
That's basically my point. It doesn't seem like we changed our practices that much. I would have thought we'd test the animals, process them separately, etc.
The interesting thing is that for other prions like scapie and CWD are thought to spread through body fluids and feces and be available in the environment for years. But I don't see any of these concerns listed with BSE. Makes me wonder how much is guess work and how much is confirmed about any of them. But I suspect environmental contamination could be a possible vector. If spread through stuff like urine and feces, CAFOs could be a significant source. This could be a problem if they can be infected for years before symptoms arise, while time to market is 18 months.
I know nothing about evolutionary biology, and I wonder if there is any chance that this is true.
The evolutionary defenses are to break apart all incoming proteins and reassemble them yourself, and have a cycle of life that starts new organisms from scratch. Large carnivores can't hope to break apart every incoming protein, though. So, basically our lifespans and reproduction method of growing up from a single cell are the evolutionary defenses against the natural phenomenon of prions. But yes, prion disease is probably what forces all higher foodchain animals to avoid cannibalism.
(in fact, the misfolded form is so stable it can survive cooking, autoclaving(!), sitting in soil for years, and digestion. The main reason it's not a big threat is that it needs to somehow get from the environment into the brain, generally via the gut, which is not a particularly easy process for an inert clump of amino acids: a significant percentage of UK residents actually have detectable levels of this prion in their gut already, but only a very small fraction will develop the disease)
Is there something distinct about Brian tissue which puts it at a higher risk for prion disease formation?
Other tissue like skin or muscle that regularly break down and regrow would offer a lot more opportunity for the body to filter out the prions, but once in the brain cells, there's nothing for them to do but accumulate.
(this protein, by the way, is not essential for life, but lacking it seems to slow brain development in mice)
A thing eating dead instances of its same family is already a near ideal situation for passing disease, no fancy evolutionary mechanism required. Frankly, hard to imagine a better one.
If mammals needed a ‘anti cannibalism’ evolutionary mechanism there are plenty of other mechanisms - like disgust responses - that would actually prevent disease.
Alzheimer's is a terrible disease that is going to wreck havoc on the lives of of countless millenials/genzs as their baby boomer parent's age into it. We need to understand this disease as soon as possible.