Another Neurodegenerative Disease Linked To a Prion

MTorrice writes: A new study concludes that a brain protein causes the rare, Parkinson's-like disease called multiple systems atrophy (MSA) by acting like a prion, the misbehaving type of protein infamously linked to mad cow disease. The researchers say the results are the most definitive demonstration to date that proteins involved in many neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, exhibit prion-like behavior: They can misfold into shapes that then coax others to do the same, leading to protein aggregation that forms neurotoxic clumps. If these other diseases are caused by prion-like proteins, then scientists could develop treatments that slow or stop disease progression by designing molecules that block prion propagation.

Comments

How to Shove a Yoda Doll up your ass! The 9 Steps

[Anonymous Coward]

How to Shove a Yoda Doll up your ass! The 9 Step Greased Up Yoda Doll Shoving process. Go Linux! Tsarkon Reports

9 steps to greasing your anus for Yoda Doll Insertion!
v 4.97.3
$YodaBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/yodanotes/9stepprocess.sgml,v 4.97.3 2015/9/3 15:42:20 tsarkon Exp $

1. Defecate. Preferably after eating senna, ex lax, prunes, cabbage, pickled eggs, and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. To better enhance the pleasure of this whole process, defecation should be performed in the Return of the Jedi wastebasket for added pleasure.
2. Wipe ass with witch hazel, which soothes horrific burns. (Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda certifies that his lips, raw like beaten flank steak from nearly continuous analingus with dogs, are greatly soothed by witch hazel which makes it perfect for the anus after diarrhea.)
3. Prime anus with anal ease. (Now Cherry Flavored for those butthole lick-o-phillic amongst you - very popular with 99% of the Slashdotting public!)
4. Slather richly a considerable amount of Vaseline and/or other anal lubricants into your rectum at least until the bend and also take your Yoda Doll , Yoda Shampoo bottle or Yoda soap-on-a-rope and liberally apply the lubricants to the Yoda Doll/Yoda Shampoo/Yoda Soap-on-a-rope. You may need your gay squire/lover to help with this since your fat corpulent ass cannot do a self-reach-around.
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6. Make sure to have a mechanism by which to fish Yoda out of your rectum, the soap on the rope is especially useful because the retrieval mechanism is built in.
7. Pucker and relax your balloon knot. Doing Kegel exercises several times actuating the sphincter muscle and relaxing it will help prepare your ass for what is to come.
8. Slowly rest yourself onto your Yoda figurine. Be careful, he's probably bigger than the dicks normally being rammed up your ass!
9. Gyrate gleefully in your computer chair while your fat sexless geek nerd loser fat shit self enjoys the prostate massage you'll be getting. Think about snoodling with the Sarlaac pit. Read Slashdot. Masturbate to anime. Email one of the Slashdot editors hoping they will honor you with a reply. Join several more dating services - this time, you don't select the (desired - speaks English) and (desired - literate). You figure you might get a chance then. Order some fucking crap from Think Geek. Suck and gag on a Dr. Who sonic screwdriver like it was the Doctor's dick in your mouth. Get Linux to boot on a Black and Decker Toaster Oven. Wish you could afford a new computer. Argue that cheap-ass discount bin hardware works 'just as well' as the quality and premium hardware because you can't afford the real stuff. Make claims about how Linux rules. Compile a kernel on your 486SX. Claim to hate Windows but use it for World of Warcraft. Admire Ghyslain's courage in making that wonderful Star Wars movie. Officially convert to the Jedi religion. Talk about how cool Mega Tokyo is. Try and make sure you do your regular 50 story submissions to Slashdot, all of which get rejected because people who aren't fatter than CowboyNeal c

great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have huntington's disease, so this could be really awesome.

NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA used this prion to... wait? what?!

Re:NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong thread. This prion was made on a 3D printer by a woman.

Too Tired To Read

[Anonymous Coward]

For a moment I thought it read "Another Neurodegenerative Disease Linked to Porn". I was very concerned during that moment.

Re:Too Tired To Read

[morgauxo]

Don't worry, Fapping@Home is hard at work looking for the cure!

Folding@Home

[SumDog]

I wonder how much Folding@Home helped contribute to discovering this.

Re:Folding@Home

[Anonymous Coward]

Zero. It was 100% funded by big bad Pharma that you guys all claim to hate.

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

Zero. It was 100% funded by big bad Pharma that you guys all claim to hate.

Wrong. It was funded by the customers of big bad Pharma.

Remember, all corporate research is ultimately funded by customers. Before you go giving them some humanitarian award. don't forget it's always the customers that pay the bill.

Re:Folding@Home

[khallow]

Wrong. It was funded by the customers of big bad Pharma.

Customers didn't choose to fund the research, hence, it's not their baby. And are we going to credit the banks too? They fondled that funding a little bit, sometimes between customer and pharma company. Maybe some drug dealers of the illegal sort? Fast food restaurants? ATM machines?

There's a saying that I think applies here. Money has no provenance. It doesn't matter where the money came from. The people who decided to fund the research are the ones who should be credited for funding the research.

Re:Folding@Home

[SecurityGuy]

Before you go giving them some humanitarian award. don't forget it's always the customers that pay the bill.

This is so completely wrong. The customers paid for a drug. They got the drug, and now the money they paid for it isn't theirs. Big bad pharma then took the money that belonged to them and paid for the research.

Your claim only holds water if the customers had a choice (yes, I'll pay $5 for the drug, and $5 to fund future research!) and chose to invest in research. They didn't.

Re:Folding@Home

[pnutjam]

Wait!!
That talking point is only to be used for discussing fees and taxes. Get with the program.

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

Customers didn't choose to fund the research, hence, it's not their baby.

It's not their "baby", but it's their money.

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

This is so completely wrong. The customers paid for a drug. They got the drug, and now the money they paid for it isn't theirs. Big bad pharma then took the money that belonged to them and paid for the research.

Let me know when the day comes that a pharmaceutical company chooses to spend money on research and not recoup it from consumers, plus profit.

It's always consumers that pay, in front or at the end, it's always consumers.

Re:Folding@Home

[avandesande]

Folding at home caused it!

Re:Folding@Home

[pushing-robot]

Really? Did they print it themselves?

Re:Folding@Home

[SecurityGuy]

That's not relevant. My employer paid for my labor. What I do with the money once it's mine isn't the responsibility or to the credit of my employer. What a pharmaceutical company does with their profits once they belong to them are in exactly the same way not to the credit of their customer.

You can keep following that chain back indefinitely. It's not really the consumer's money, it's their employers, or their governments, or whatever. It's a nonsensical view.

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

Really? Did they print it themselves?

No, they spent it themselves.

Why is it so hard for people to understand that a consumer economy is funded by the consumers? That the labor and productivity and earnings of people pay all the bills? Is this some artifact left over from the supply-side economics of the '80s?

No exceptions.

Re:Folding@Home

[tnk1]

You're missing the point, though.

Yes, that money passed through the hands of the customers. The customers passed that money to the pharmaceutical company for a good (drugs) that they wanted. That money then entered the account of the company which funded the research. The consumers didn't choose that path for what used to be their money.

Now, if the consumers had a *choice*, that money could have been spent on research for prion-like diseases, but more likely, it would have been spent on a trip to the Bahamas, a new car, or even on talking to fake women on AshleyMadison.com.

Would the customers have chosen to fund this research with their money? Maybe... but they didn't. Here they spent the money on something that they needed for themselves. And honestly, 75% of them probably don't even know what a prion is, or they think it is a new model of hybrid car. Or they would have decided to fund something else, like cancer research, or possibly bogus pop-science.

The drug company took the money that they obtained for the sale of a drug that was created based on previous research and then rolled it back into R&D which supports the drug company's future profits: (ie. this research).

Should we give credit to the company for their charity in bringing these drugs to us? Hell, no. This is what those companies do. They are engines for producing drugs to bring in profit.

Still, there needs to be an understanding that profit motive is a big reason that research like this does get done. Comsumers are part of the economy, but they are a natural force like the wind or the sun beating down. Direction of money, time, resources and manpower is important and the consumers aren't doing that when it comes to certain things like R&D projects.

Re:Folding@Home

[khallow]

Why is it so hard for people to understand that a consumer economy is funded by the consumers?

There's more to an economy than just consumers. By merely using the term "consumer" you imply the existence of producers who produce the goods and services which are consumed by the consumers. Why is it so hard to credit the people who make decisions with the consequences, good and bad, of those decisions?

That the labor and productivity and earnings of people pay all the bills?

Which is tangential to your assertion of a consumer economy. One doesn't speak of the labor, productivity, or earnings of a consumer. A consumer consumes by definition and consumption is not dependent on those things. Producers have those things.

Is this some artifact left over from the supply-side economics of the '80s?

That you even ask that question indicates you have something to unlearn. The consumer economy is an ideologically driven model. I believe it exists precisely for the use you put it to, to denigrate owners of capital.

No exceptions.

Except the real world, of course. Real economies routinely have complex transactions in which the roles of consumer and producer are often indeterminable. For example, what's the good or service consumed in stock trading and who actually consumes it? And mutual production/consumption is not uncommon (eg, bartering manufactured goods or consumables, or a swap of capital equipment for businesses on the move).

Re:Folding@Home

[PopeRatzo]

For example, what's the good or service consumed in stock trading and who actually consumes it?

I agree. It is merely a mechanism of siphoning money from those who work to those who own.

hah

[sociocapitalist]

So my grampa was right - too much pron makes you blind!

Enact legislation!

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlaw prions!
Won't SOMEBODY think of the children?

So keep spreading human waste on our farm fields

[Anonymous Coward]

what could go wrong?

Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they forgot to include that in the summary. Vegetarians aren't going to be affected by this, and will be the normal ones when the zombie apocalypse happens.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Applehu Akbar]

And vegans will be affected even less. This means that generations from now, all of humanity will be smug, peachy, insufferable feminine hygiene products. When the first PBS signals of this change reach and are interpreted by other intelligent civilizations, they will send a special fleet to wipe us out.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prions are in milk. Vegetarians are affected. Vegans, perhaps not. Issue is, the typical replacement for meat, tofu, increases estrogen, and thus puts people at risk of breast cancer and dementia. And that's assuming you put the effort in to have proper nutrients in your diet--something that non-vegetarians don't worry about as much as meat helps provide what is lacking in fruits and vegetables (Yes, most lack certain vitamins, effort must be made to maintain a healthy diet by increasing consumption of specific foods as a vegan. Vegetarians have the benefit of milk.).

So it sure isn't all roses!

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

No food is perfectly safe. Veggies often have pesticides. Water (and most everything else, actually) has harmful chemicals leeched from plastic. You just can't escape risk no matter what you eat.

One can reduce the major food risks significantly without too much effort....but....that won't be what gets us in the end. The overuse of antibiotics in factory farming will create essentially untreatable (and contagious) diseases. The vegans will still catch these diseases from their meat-eating neighbors.

There is no escape, really.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

am I understanding you correctly that you're constructing an insult by basing it on "anything to do with women or products of their bodies"?

Is this considered retro, or am I actually time-travelling back to 1950?

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

am I understanding you correctly that you're constructing an insult by basing it on "anything to do with women or products of their bodies"?

Is this considered retro, or am I actually time-travelling back to 1950?

Actually, from what I know about old people, this sort of thing would have just gotten you blank stares in 1950. Outside of male gynecologists who smoked Pall Malls during the pelvic exam, most men didn't know and didn't want to know anything about that whole... process... down there. The women might have wrinkled their brows if you called someone a douchebag, and maybe eventually pieced together your meaning from context clues. But they probably wouldn't then spread the meme.

No, I suspect it was probably Baby-Boomers watching the first television commercials for feminine hygeine products in the 1970s and joking about it with their friends that made "douchebag" an insult word in our culture.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[morgauxo]

And that would be different from today how? The only difference I see is that more people currently do eat meat.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anne Thwacks]

No food is perfectly safe.

Food is a deadly substance - everyone who eats it, dies. It should be banned immediately (think of the children).

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Vegan Cyclist]

Err...what nutrients are there in milk that aren't in vegan foods? (With the exception of B12, but most of it isn't in the 'food', it's in the fecal matter of cows which contaminates the milk - and *everyone* over 50 now is recommended to take a B12 supplement, I bet that'll drop more as many meat-eaters have problems with B12 -- it's not an issue of consumption, it's usually an issue with the ability to absorb B12. Same with the traces of iodine in milk - it's residue from the cleaning products in the processing plants, not from milk itself.)

Check out a book called 'Got Milked?', it's written (calm down) by a non-vegan, and really examines how milk came about, and why it's such a huge feature in some Western areas (it's barely more than a condiment in much of the rest of the world; many immigrants look at it, wondering why a condiment has a whole 'food group' in places like Canada and the US.) Plenty of other plant-based foods are *much* better sources of the nutrients in milk (did you know calcium from plants is much easier for us to absorb?) Finally, why on earth are grown monkeys drinking the milk from cows?? It's really quite mad when you step back from what our society has taught us. Were I not vegan, I would still probably have to ask myself: 'why are we drinking this stuff'?

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[tylikcat]

What they showed was that what was presumably a misfolding disorder was also infectious. They didn't show a means of transmission that would be viable in the wild - you don't just have someone's brain matter fly into your head. This isn't the same prion (PRP) as that related to Mad Cow. The means of transmission might be completely different. It might not transmit at all - it might be that proteins misfold spontaneously, and once you've gotten one (or more likely, a few) they drag a bunch of others along, but that it is not transmissible between persons. It might be similar to mad cow, or it might be a different mechanism - keep in mind the difference between Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - one you could only get if you either had the misfolding yourself or if you ate someone's brain. The other you could get from eating cow neural tissue.

And, of course, Mad Cow, for all that it was both very infectious and quick moving for a prion, was super inefficient overall. And awful lot (tens of thousands, at least) infected cows entered the food supply for every person who got Mad Cow. The takeaway? While most prions we know of aren't nearly so bad, there's room for prions to be much, much worse.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[MTorrice]

Remember: We all have proteins that can act like prions. The prion protein responsible for mad cow disease is in the brains of all cows, and a version is in all people. It's a misfolded form of the protein that causes disease. And most people with prion diseases don't get it from eating meat. Only about 1% of prion diseases come from infections--eating animal meat with misfolded prions, for example. Up to 20% of people with diseases have genetic mutations that cause the misfolding. But about 80% of the cases are just sporadic misfolding of unknown cause. Also prion diseases are super rare--about 1 case in a million people. So prions in meat is a pretty low risk situation. What this study is showing is that classical prion proteins aren't the only ones that misfold and then get other proteins to misfold with them, causing disease in the process. Basically, what this group is saying is that "prion" is a much broader concept in biology--that many proteins beyond the mad cow ones can act like that.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a little ironic that a vegan would think that drinking milk is somehow "unnatural". Humans literally evolved to eat meat, and cooked meat in particular, and a substantial number of human populations have evolved to consume milk. In any event, the hallmark of most bogus arguments is labeling things as "natural" or "unnatural".

Milk is a strong source of calcium, phosphate, and many other nutrients. Obviously you can get these things from other sources. The diets of different cultures have evolved--some better than others--to provide at the very least the minimum requirements. Milk is a big part of Western European food culture, especially for children. If you eat a generally Western European diet, or especially an American diet, drinking milk during childhood is recommended by almost all professionals, all things else being equal.

Obviously if you have the time, money, and/or inclination to construct a particular diet, all the more power to you. But if you look back over the history of nutritional myth and science, isolating a particular foodstuff based on fad ideas about nutrition doesn't have a very good track record. Lots of yuppie parents have been switching from milk to soy and almond milk. But most soy and almond milk has significant amounts of sugar added. And almond milk is just a horrible source of nutrients overall.

You know what does have a good track record? Variety. Also, not developing strong opinions about something unless and until there exists strong evidence--e.g. large-scale randomized, controlled trials. Nutritional science is worse than economics in terms of its evidence base.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[tnk1]

Prions can come from eating meat for certain. That's the whole Mad Cow Disease thing.

However, it is not clear that this is the *only* way they can be introduced to the body. They could arise spontaneously because a prion is simply a "malignant" form of a protein that the body already produces normally.

So, it is possible that there could be genetic predisposition, or even environmental causes which introduce prion-forms to the body by re-folding an existing protein already in the body.

Re:Don't Prions come from eating Meat?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't prions come from eating Meat"?

No, prions don't come from "eating meat".
Eating meat does not give you prions.

Contaminated meat is one of the vectors for transmitting prion diseases. There are others.
Prion diseases come from eating anything that has been contaminated with brain and spinal cord tissue of animals that have one of the prion diseases.
If you take the brain from a cow, sheep, goat, deer or human that has a prion disease and sprinkle it on a bowl of rice, then you can get a prion disease.
Theoretically, you can eat just the meat from a carefully slaughtered cow ( don't open the skull or spinal cord) and not get prion disease. However, I'm not going to volunteer for that experiment.
It's believed that the men got Kuru at a much lower rate than the women because generally the women ate the brains and the men ate only the muscle tissue. There may be other factors at work, though, due to the women being the ones to do the butchering.

Prion diseases are found in the wild among vegetarian animals such as deer that do not eat meat.
It is believed that because prions are so very durable, infected wild animals that die can contaminate the water or soil their decomposing brain tissues.
If they drink water that has been contaminated with prions, then they can get the disease.

Misogyny

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just patriarchial conspriacy theory bait for troglodyte slashdotters. Prions are a white male fantasy of asexual, femaleless reproductive colonisation. This story is literally rape of the forces of mother nature.

Re: Misogyny

[Anonymous Coward]

Please elaborate

Stanley Pruisner

[SecurityGuy]

It's interesting for me to see this guy's name come up. I remember reading a fairly derogatory article about him in Scientific American in the 80s, all but calling him a fraud. Sometimes the "fraud" is proven right. Worth remembering.

Re:Stanley Pruisner

[clonehappy]

Not worth remembering AT ALL. The full force and credit of the mainstream media is NEVER used to discredit people working on projects that might cause embarrassment to the establishment, or worse find simple root-cause explanations for ailments that could have their symptoms managed with expensive drugs. Never, ever. Your example is the one and only time one of these crackpot, terrorist, conspiracy-theorist, tinfoil-hat frauds has ever been proven right.

sarcasm off

It's definitely worth remembering, and just think about how many people looking for the truth have been silenced or worse because they went up against the status quo. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn that the SA article from the 80s even had some form of the verbiage "the science is settled".

Re:Stanley Pruisner

[tylikcat]

Mm. The prion work has been largely supported. However, he was not the first person to originate the concept of an infectious protein, and there's an argument to be made that his primary contribution to the field was the name "prion".

I wouldn't disregard his work, but double check everything. (A former labmate in a previous lab went toe to toe against him for her dissertation work - and totally won, but watching him try to bash by means of his position when he just didn't have the data was pretty unsettling.)

Still, this is pretty exciting if it stands up.

Damn Toyota!!!

[jtseng]

They thought they could get away with a defective product - oh wait - the culprit is a PRION, not a PRIUS! Nvm...

Prions are for mad cows.

[sims 2]

Sorry someone had to say it.

But really how do we get to "scientists could develop treatments that slow or stop disease progression by designing molecules that block prion propagation."

from "Another Neurodegenerative Disease Linked To a Prion"

Does having more than one disease use the same vulnerability make it easier to fix somehow?

Re:Prions are for mad cows.

[MTorrice]

Right now there are no drugs that stop or even slow Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. And that's not for a lack of trying. There have been several notable failures recently--drugs that went to clinical trials and showed no effects in patients. These drugs were designed before this idea that all these diseases were due to prionlike mechanisms started to pick up steam in the field. So now that there have been some fairly big papers suggesting that prionlike proteins are the cause, people can start looking at new designs for drugs that would stop prionlike propagation. Basically, people have already been doing that for classical prion diseases--making molecules that stop those proteins from aggregating into fibrils. So now drug makers could take all that's been learned with those molecules and apply them to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Gardens may contain prions...

[Etherwalk]

I know someone who gardens on a friend's small farm. The neighbor's mother had a neurodegenerative disorder, the neighbor's neighbor's son had a neurodegenerative disorder, and the neighbor has been beginning to show signs of a neurodegenerative disorder for the last year or so.

I asked one of the top prion researchers in the country if there could be a problem with prions in the soil being absorbed into the various plants on the property that people eat (garden, apple trees, etc...)

His response: "That's a FASCINATING hypothesis!"

Are prions a life form?

[Myria]

If you define viruses as a life form, then I think prions ought to be considered a life form. They work by coaxing something else into reproducing themselves.

I'm probably not the first person to have thought about this. To me, it sounds like this could be a model for theories of abiogenesis.

Re:Are prions a life form?

[MTorrice]

But prions don't actually reproduce--they already exist in our brains. All mammals have prion proteins in their brain. The propagation starts when one of these normally folded one misfolds, or a misfolded one gets into the brain from some other source. Then it causes the existing proteins to misfold. No new molecules are created in this process. In fact, a disease form of a prion is the exact same molecule as a healthy form. It's just a change in shape. Viruses don't hit on all the hallmarks of life, and prions hit even fewer.

Re: Are prions a life form?

[Ivan the Terrible]

I wonder. Are all proteins capable of being misfolded in a prion-like way?

Re:Are prions a life form?

[cwsumner]

Only if you consider an automatic traffic gate a life form. It coaxes people to build more by letting cars into the parking garage until it is full!
Otherwise ... No.

Nice troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

As I'm sure you know, there is nothing preventing corporate use of the information gained by folding@home, and it would be pretty much impossible to quantify how that might or might not have affected the research and capabilities of the people who published these results.

Nice troll, though! Keep up the good work.

Miss Direction

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us not find out what creates the prions to begin with and fix it, as we cannot make money that way.
Let us find a drug to sell that inhibits the cascading effect of prion propagation so they need us for life.