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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.
For a moment I thought it read "Another Neurodegenerative Disease Linked to Porn". I was very concerned during that moment.
I wonder how much Folding@Home helped contribute to discovering this.
So my grampa was right - too much pron makes you blind!
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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.
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!
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.
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.
And that would be different from today how? The only difference I see is that more people currently do eat meat.
Food is a deadly substance - everyone who eats it, dies. It should be banned immediately (think of the children).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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'?
They thought they could get away with a defective product - oh wait - the culprit is a PRION, not a PRIUS! Nvm...
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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?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
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.
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.
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!"
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.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
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.