To date, more than 2,000 people in the UK have died from ‘mad cow disease’, or Kreutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare but fatal degenerative brain disease caused by abnormal proteins called prions that damage brain cells.
For the moment, there is no known cure yet and the disease is most often without outcome. There is also no simple test to detect the disease early. Instead, doctors must take a tissue sample from the spinal brain, or wait for a sample collected post-mortem.
Still no treatment
But researchers at University College London in the UK have now found that it is possible to detect disease-providing prions in urine. This would provide a way to detect Kreutzfeldt-Jakob pathology early, the researchers say, although there is no cure.
The study involved urine samples from 162 people. Among those :
91 were healthy “controls”
34 had a neurological disease other than Kreutzfeldt-Jakob disease
37 had the disease.
The urine test did not give a “false positive”, that is, it did not detect the disease in people who did not have it. But he only accurately detected the pathology in half of the patients. The researchers plan to continue their work to improve the reliability of the tests.
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