Prion-Like Proteins Drive Several Diseases of Aging

Before you start panicking, these diseases "can not be passed from person to person under normal circumstances." That said, looks like scientists are doing science again instead of crowd control.

Prion-like proteins drive several diseases of aging

Mathias Jucker and Lary Walker outline the emerging concept that many of the brain diseases associated with aging, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are caused by specific proteins that misfold and aggregate into harmful seeds.

These seeds behave very much like the pathogenic agents known as prions, which cause mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease in deer, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

...Unlike prion diseases, which can be infectious, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases can not be passed from person to person under normal circumstances. Once all of these diseases take hold in the brain, however, it is increasingly apparent that the clumps of misfolded proteins spread throughout the nervous system and disrupt its function.

Self-propagation of pathogenic protein aggregates in neurodegenerative diseases

For several decades scientists have speculated that the key to understanding age-related neurodegenerative disorders may be found in the unusual biology of the prion diseases. Recently, owing largely to the advent of new disease models, this hypothesis has gained experimental momentum. In a remarkable variety of diseases, specific proteins have been found to misfold and aggregate into seeds that structurally corrupt like proteins, causing them to aggregate and form pathogenic assemblies ranging from small oligomers to large masses of amyloid. Proteinaceous seeds can therefore serve as self-propagating agents for the instigation and progression of disease. Alzheimer’s disease and other cerebral proteopathies seem to arise from the de novo misfolding and sustained corruption of endogenous proteins, whereas prion diseases can also be infectious in origin. However, the outcome in all cases is the functional compromise of the nervous system, because the aggregated proteins gain a toxic function and/or lose their normal function. As a unifying pathogenic principle, the prion paradigm suggests broadly relevant therapeutic directions for a large class of currently intractable diseases.

Every step towards better understanding of mental diseases and eventually finding a cure must be saluted.

My grandfather died of Alzheimer and I saw what all these years of suffering did to my family... and with all my heart I can hope for a better world for future generations.

Call me crazy...

But I say most (if not all) diseases (cancer included) are caused by some form of viral/fungal/bacterial/-toxical infection that occurred at some point (undetected and/or never completely cleared up) in a person's life which then causes a toxic "trigger" effect at the cellular level, resulting in cellular dysfunction. And thus, evolves into some type of disease years later.

Particularly autoimmune diseases, which seems to be damn near everything and everyone these days.

Disease is not a body malfunction, but a cellular one.

And I also believe most of these inflammatory infections start in the GI tract.



... I'm still waiting for science to figure this out.

reply to post by CranialSponge

...I say most (if not all) diseases (cancer included) are caused by some form of viral/fungal/bacterial/-toxical infection

Yep, could be cuz those little suckers can transport prions.