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A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

bbc.com

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Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#91

Post by nubinetwork »

oezi wrote: post #84
matsemann wrote: post #60

Some questions I'm stuck with: * are all the patients really sick or as sick as the symptoms he documents, or is it some kind of Munchausen induced or lied about by the doctor? * Or are they all sick, they're just not getting the help they need because he wants to have a mystery disease? * If they're all sick, is it then a higher prevalence than expected, so even if there is no mystery disease there is still somethin…

The prevalence question isn't really answered in the article. If it is 500 cases in an area in which 1m people live then it might not really be a cluster. But if it is 500 cases out of a town of 40000 then it is quite something different.

The entire province only has a population of 800-900k

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#92

Post by pash »

thelastgallon wrote: post #80
pash wrote: post #46

I’m not qualified to comment intelligently on what might be going on here, but I’d like to add some background color that the article lacks. Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope. Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a s…

Thank you for the context. > some are transmitted, typically by eating some part of an animal that contains prions, which then end up in your own body, inducing proteins in your body to take on prion configurations. I wonder about this part. I thought consumed protein gets broken down into amino acids and new proteins are created later. Do prion proteins bypass this step?

From what I understand, which is very incomplete, the leading hypothesis at the moment is that ingested prions are a bit hard to digest (because they’re malformed proteins), so they end up making it out of the gastrointestinal tract somehow, interacting with the nervous system via the intestinal lining or lymphatic system. Then they travel to the brain via nervous pathways, by-passing the usual blood–brain barrier.

But transmission of prions by ingestion is thought to be quite rare, as that mechanism suggests. Transmission by any means seems to be quite rare, even heritable transmission (e.g., vCJD). So that’s why it seems unlikely that whatever is happening in New Brunswick is CVD.

But if it’s not some minor mass hysteria, then maybe prions.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#93

Post by wombatpm »

pash wrote: post #46

I’m not qualified to comment intelligently on what might be going on here, but I’d like to add some background color that the article lacks. Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope. Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a s…

The first patient in this cluster to die should provide confirmation of CJD or other prion disease.

There is a theory that spontaneous CJD can be spread environmentally. Apparently particles of sufficiently small size (10 nm) can pass from the nasal cavity directly into the brain via the olfactory nerve. And there was a cluster of CJD victims who were rose gardeners. Rose gardening commonly use Bone and Blood meal to feed the roses, and is typically made from cattle unfit for consumption-ie downer cows/BSE. I may have read about it in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance Book by Laurie Garrett.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#95

Post by RobotToaster »

throwaway_9879 wrote: post #29

The answer is "nothing" The only common factor between these patients is Dr. Marrero. It is notable that he is not the only physician who works in that clinic, but is the only one diagnosing this condition. The most likely cause is weak diagnostic skills for challenging patients. Unfortunately, a majority of these patients likely have Functional Neurologic Disorder https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/conve…

FND is itself basically a trashcan diagnosis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wastebasket_diagnosis

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#96

Post by sebasv_ »

ajb wrote: post #63
throwaway_9879 wrote: post #29

The answer is "nothing" The only common factor between these patients is Dr. Marrero. It is notable that he is not the only physician who works in that clinic, but is the only one diagnosing this condition. The most likely cause is weak diagnostic skills for challenging patients. Unfortunately, a majority of these patients likely have Functional Neurologic Disorder https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/conve…

This guy is probably chasing moonshine, but TBH "functional neurological disorder" sounds like one of those face-saving labels that doctors use when they don't have any idea what's going on.

It is not meant to save the doctors face. The very definition of FND is "doctors dont know what is wrong, but they acknowledge that your symptoms are real".

The point of giving it a name is in the second part. Its about explicitly acknowledging the limitations of medicine

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#98

Post by autoexec »

wombatpm wrote: post #93
pash wrote: post #46

I’m not qualified to comment intelligently on what might be going on here, but I’d like to add some background color that the article lacks. Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope. Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a s…

The first patient in this cluster to die should provide confirmation of CJD or other prion disease. There is a theory that spontaneous CJD can be spread environmentally. Apparently particles of sufficiently small size (10 nm) can pass from the nasal cavity directly into the brain via the olfactory nerve. And there was a cluster of CJD victims who were rose gardeners. Rose gardening commonly use Bone and Blood meal to…

They've done autopsies on 11 which pointed to various known conditions according to the article.

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#99

Post by RobotToaster »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #87
pash wrote: post #46

I’m not qualified to comment intelligently on what might be going on here, but I’d like to add some background color that the article lacks. Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease is a prion disease [0] for which there is no definitive diagnosis in vivo. A confident diagnosis can be made only after examining brain tissue under a microscope. Prions are an unusual type of mis-folded protein that induce other proteins to take on a s…

> but rarely nervous tissue of cattle infected with BSE, which is present in Canada more than anywhere else (by a small margin). I don't think that that's quite right. Over the past 15 years, only 3 cases have been reported in Canadian cattle [0], while Canada has over 12 million cattle at any given moment [1]. This organization claims that Taiwan, Greece, Ecuador, and Russia are all higher-risk [2]. You could certai…

There's estimates that 13% of Alzheimer's disease cases are misdiagnosed CJD.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15694685/

https://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/Neuroscience.2015....

Re: A battle over Canada’s mystery brain disease

#100

Post by Kina »

patcon wrote: post #77

I grew up in New Brunswick. It is a strange place politically. I find it wild that the BBC never mentioned the most glaring underbelly of this: New Brunswicks most significant employer for the past 100 years is Irving Oil & Irving Paper and Irving Forestry. They are different arms of a privately held family-run business, run by the descendants of the original founder (whose records are not as public as a traded compa…

The Family That Owns New Brunswick: The House of Irving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9I-HY3wfVM
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