Re:Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada
by omgwtfbbq on Wednesday May 05, 2021 @04:18PM
(#27055145)
Are there other tests to determine prion disease related brain degeneration? Seems hard to believe they can't identify at all what the cause is.
Re:Doctors investigate mystery brain disease in Canada
by eganp on Thursday May 06, 2021 @01:04AM
(#27059340)
Intracranial inoculation of infected tissue is the old-school way to assay for prion activity. Sometimes it takes a few years to get an answer though, especially in cross-species assays [0].
[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-5338-3_...
So a CJD test is usually staining a biopsy with congo red and observing apple-green birefringence in the image. This generally works to detect amyloid plaques, which is common to all prions. So unless there was a lab mistake, the prion is localized elsewhere from where the biopsies are being done (FFI, for example, localizes to a different part of the brain) or they were using some other procedure, it's seems pretty unlikely this is a prion disease.