The discovery of antidepressant drugs in the 1950s led to the first biochemical hypothesis of depression, known as the monoamine hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that an imbalance of certain brain chemicals is the key ...
Aug 13, 2015
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Rabbits have long been considered immune to prion disease, but recently scientists have shown that they can—under certain circumstances—get transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (or TSE, the scientific term for the ...
Aug 6, 2015
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Diagnosis of deadly brain conditions could be helped by new research that shows how infectious proteins that cause the disease spread.
Aug 4, 2015
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In the most systematic and rigorous study conducted thus far in its field, the prion protein (PrPC) was clearly shown to play a role in preventing the onset of epileptic seizures. PrPC is perhaps best known in its 'degenerate' ...
Jul 9, 2015
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Prions are fascinating, enigmatic, and might teach us not only about rare prion diseases like Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, mad cow disease, or scrapie, but also about other more common neurodgenerative diseases. Two studies ...
Jul 2, 2015
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Chronic wasting disease (CWD)—an infectious disease caused by prions—affects North American elk and deer, but has not been observed in humans. Using a mouse model that expresses an altered form of the normal human prion ...
Feb 23, 2015
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Botching a few folds might transform an origami cow into a deer or sheep. When cellular proteins do the same, they can trigger fatal neurodegenerative diseases that turn the brains of these mammals into dysfunctional sponges.
Feb 23, 2015
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Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have for the first time discovered a killing mechanism that could underpin a range of the most intractable neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, ...
Feb 12, 2015
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The cellular prion protein (PrPC) has the ability to protect the brain's neurons. Although scientists have known about this protective physiological function for some time, they were lacking detailed knowledge of the molecular ...
Dec 17, 2014
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The misfolded and infectious prion protein that is a marker for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease – linked to the consumption of infected cattle meat – has been detected in the urine of patients with the disease by researchers ...
Aug 7, 2014
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