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Is Alzheimer's an Infectious Disease?
This is very interesting.The brain damage that characterizes Alzheimer's disease may start out in a form similar to that of infectious diseases, according to a new study. The underlying mechanism of Alzheimer's is very similar to prion diseases like mad cow. It involves a normal protein that becomes misshapen and is able to spread by transforming good proteins into bad ones. The bad proteins accumulate in the brain and form plaque deposits that are believed to kill neuron cells. For the current study, researchers injected the brain tissue of an Alzheimer's patient into mice and compared the results to those from injected tissue of a control without the disease. None of the mice injected with the control showed symptoms of Alzheimer's, while all of those injected with Alzheimer's brain extracts developed plaques and other brain changes associated with the disease. Researchers said the findings open the possibility that Alzheimer's cases may arise from infectious processes. And if this mental disease could be infectious, perhaps Islam could also be an infectious mental disease. Posted by: Glenmore 2011-10-05 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=331090 |