5 ms·
It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.
by diob 3y ago
It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoYeah, these paragraphs from the paper sounds like the amyloid proteins can sometimes look/act like a prion if you squint: > The far wider relevance of prion mechanisms was first exemplified with the discovery of yeast prions but has also widened considerably with the recognition that the more common human neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, involve accumulation and spread of assemblies of misfolded host proteins in what is often described as a ‘prion-like’ fashion with experimental transmission of relevant pathology in primates or mouse models. However, the importance for human disease was unclear until the recognition of human transmission of amyloid-beta (Aβ) pathology via iatrogenic routes after prolonged incubation periods, causing iatrogenic cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and raising the possibility that iatrogenic Alzheimer’s disease may occur at even longer latency.
- jychang 3y agoThe thing is (despite popular misconception that prions are common and many proteins that can turn into prions), there is only a specific protein that can be a prion- the PrP protein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoPerhaps a first pass research question is: Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population? Otherwise there is no point in chasing this "some other other protein behaving like a prion" avenue.
- carlmr 3y ago>Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population? In that case scarring/inflammation might trigger the Alzheimer's though. The interesting part in this article is that the growth hormone was not injected into brain tissue I assume.
- tim333 3y agoThere are quite a lot of diseases where a prion like mechanism is suspected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion#In_other_diseases ie. some protein other than PrP gets misfolded and then acts as a template to cause more misfolding. I've read up a bit on ALS as my sister has it and while it's not fully understood the most likely cause seems misfolding of a proteins called or TDP-43 or SOD1. Eg from a paper: >recent cultured cell line and animal model studies suggest that the misfolded forms of SOD1 and TDP-43 do self-propagate within neuronal cells and transmit to neighboring cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/
- Thorrez 3y agoWikipedia seems to say there's another one: >All known mammalian prion diseases were caused by PrP until 2015, when a prion form of alpha-synuclein was hypothesized to cause multiple system atrophy (MSA).[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
- goku12 3y agoThe article mentions that the procedure was banned due to incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. That is a prion disease.
- klipt 3y agoThey still use pieces of cadaver for other surgeries. E.g. gum and bone transplants done by periodontists. Seems risky to me.
- woleium 3y agoas long as it’s not spine or brain matter it’s probably okay. During the mad cow outbreak (BSE, the bovine equivalent of CJD) in the UK, they banned “beef on the bone” but not all beef.
- emayljames 3y agoAnd CJD came about from farmers using ground and processed cow brains to feed cows. What could possibly go wrong feeding a cow some cow brains!
- ljf 3y agoIt is worse than that - it first made the jump to cows when condemned sheep, infected with the similar prion disease 'scrapie', were ground up and fed to cows.
- meepmorp 3y agoThere's a human prion disease, kuru, which was caused by the practice of funerary cannibalism - where family would ritually consume parts of their deceased relatives' bodies. The moral of the story seems to be, don't eat brains.
- adrian_b 3y agoWhich is rather unfortunate. I no longer eat meat, but when I was younger I considered the brains as the tastiest part of an animal, when properly prepared and cooked. It is said that in USA eating organs is not very popular, so it is likely that many have never experienced well cooked brains, to know what they are missing. There exists a hypothesis that is rather plausible, that breaking bones and eating their content of brains and marrow has played an important role in the evolution of humans, by providing an abundant source of long-chain fatty acids, enabling the unusual mass ratio between the central nervous system and the whole body that characterizes humans.
- emayljames 3y agoWhat I found odd, is in the article it talked of the importance of sterilising medical tools used, that may have had prions on them. Prions can't even be destroyed by extreme temperatures, they are extremely scary.
- kvgr 3y agoOver 900c for several hours vs 250 in autoclave... if Alzhaimers can spread this way, i am done, because I spent days in dentist chair...