[Tax-chick]

bttt

[MarkeyD]

I have my own belief where large quantities of alcohol will continually keep those proteins from forming.

[tubebender]

The only thing I remember from my bypass surgery 2 years ago was the doctor telling me I may have memory loss afterwards. I really do believe oxygen is to key to a healthy brain...

[dalebert]

Thanks for any info on this disease. My 79 year old mother has it and my brother was just diagnosed with it at the early age 54.

[Bittersweetmd]

ping...remember to breath from your stomach and deeply! Stress, worry and lack of sleep cause us to breath shallowly and from as high up as the back of the throat area. Thus, only adding to the problems above mentioned.

[struwwelpeter]

http://science.education.nih.gov/home2.nsf/Educational+Resources/Resource+Formats/Online+Resources/+High+School/D07612181A4E785B85256CCD0064857B

Prions: Puzzling Infectious Proteins

Ruth Levy Guyer, Ph.D.

Sometimes a scientific discovery shakes the confidence of scientists, making them question whether they truly understand nature's "ground rules."

That's exactly what prions have done to scientists' understanding of the ground rules for infectious diseases. Prions cause diseases, but they aren't viruses or bacteria or fungi or parasites. They are simply proteins, and proteins were never thought to be infectious on their own. Organisms are infectious, proteins are not. Or, at least, they never used to be.

Prions entered the public's consciousness during the mad cow epidemic that hit England in 1986. For decades, however, scientists had searched for unusual, atypical infectious agents that they suspected caused some puzzling diseases that could not be linked to any of the "regular" infectious organisms. One possibility was that slow viruses--viruses that spent decades wreaking havoc in their hosts--might be the culprits, and these putative viruses were not only leisurely about multiplying but also hard to isolate. Now researchers are coming around, albeit reluctantly, to accepting the shocking fact that naked proteins can be infectious. "More than one protein chemist has declared this to be insane--and yet this is precisely what is implied by a growing number of studies" was the way one news article put it (1).

Prions (pronounced pree-ahns) enter cells and apparently convert normal proteins found within the cells into prions just like themselves. The normal cell proteins have all the same "parts" as the prions--specifically the same amino acid building blocks--but they fold differently. They are much like the toy "Transformers" that intrigued little kids in the 1980s. A sphynx could become a robot; a bug could become a warrior. Nothing was added; nothing subtracted.