Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Understanding Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a rare, degenerative, fatal brain disorder. It affects about 1 person in every 1 million per year worldwide, and about 350 cases are diagnosed per year in the U.S., according to the National Institute ...

Medical research

First all-human mouse model of inherited prion disease

Human prion diseases include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease (GSS). A new study in the open-access journal PLOS Biology reports a significant advance in the development of mouse ...

Neuroscience

Fertility and prion disease

A high degree of uncertainty surrounds the issue of the prion disease risk associated with fertility drugs derived from urine, gonadotropins. Writing in the International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management, a team ...

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Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease ( /ˈkrɔɪtsfɛlt ˈjɑːkoʊb/ kroits-felt ya-kob) or CJD is a degenerative neurological disorder (brain disease) that is incurable and invariably fatal. CJD is at times called a human form of mad cow disease, given that bovine spongiform encephalopathy is believed to be the cause of variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in humans.

CJD is the most common among the types of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy found in humans. In CJD, the brain tissue develops holes and takes on a sponge-like texture. This is due to a type of infectious protein called a prion. Prions are misfolded proteins which replicate by converting their properly folded counterparts.

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