Simple test detects fatal brain disease

Early signs of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) — an incurable brain disease caused by infectious, misshapen proteins, are difficult to interpret. First, people may simply feel depressed and can undergo personality changes or psychotic episodes. Memory loss, blindness, and coma, over a year after infection and death is usually inevitable. Now, researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and infectious diseases (Hamilton) report that found a simple nasal swab that will help doctors to detect the disease much more accurately and earlier than existing methods.

Biochemist Byron Kofi (Byron Caughey), said that "the search for simple, non-invasive diagnostic tests – "one of sacred bowls of Graal" for CJD and other diseases caused by prions. For CJD has no treatment, so early diagnosis is important as it can rule out other, treatable disorders, and it allows doctors to take precautions that prevent spreading illness to others through contact with brain tissue or cerebrospinal fluid."

Used diagnosis, removal of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), is quite painful and invasive. In the new study, scientists from Montana put a fiber optic scope up my nose patients in the uppermost part of the cavity, where the olfactory neurons. In theory, these neurons should contain higher levels of abnormal prion protein, as they are directly connected with the brain.

Compared to existing methods, which correctly identified only about 77% of the positive cases, the new test identified 97% of 30 CJD-positive patients. Kofi says that to develop a complete diagnostic sensitivity of the new method requires a higher number of patients. But it is now clear that this is a promising way to detect disease without invasive procedures.

Neurologist Gambetti Pierluigi (Pierluigi Gambetti) said: "This is a major step forward. In principle, it needs to diagnose the disorder much earlier than CSF technique, because abnormal prions accumulate in olfactory neurons faster than they migrate from the brain into the cerebrospinal fluid".

Source: nauka24news.ru/