Neurodegenerative Disease Difficult To Diagnose
Brain disease is surging around the world. Alzheimer’s disease alone is taking the lives of 50-100 million people around the world now. Millions will die of the disease this year, while many millions more will be diagnosed and misdiagnosed, while millions more will go undiagnosed. The epidemic is more severe in some countries than others. Supposedly, no one knows the scope of the problem. The evidence swept under the rug and the global misinformation campaign suggest otherwise.
Until recently, few have considered the possibility that Alzheimer’s disease is a transmissible disease. As it turns out, all evidence suggests that it is a prion disease (infectious proteins). In fact, there is no evidence to the contrary. This denial and misinformation has been fueling a public health crisis around the world for years. It’s gaining momentum.
A variety of factors can trigger neurodegenerative disease, including genetics, head trauma and neurotoxins.
Despite millions of deaths annually, experts suggest that the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease will quadruple by 2050, if not sooner. Unfortunately, there is a growing stack of evidence that Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other forms of neurodegenerative disease are transmissible. Deadly, self-replicating proteins appear to be one of the common threads. Similar proteins are now associated with the childhood cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Rogue proteins also appear to be related to the global autism epidemic.
The epidemic is more severe in some countries than others. Supposedly, no one knows the scope of the problem. The evidence swept under the rug and the global misinformation campaign suggest otherwise.
The epidemic is worse in some regions of the world than others. Finland and Iceland were at the top of the list just a few years ago. Now, China and countries in the Middle East and Persian Gulf states have soared to the top of the list.
In the United States, for example, deaths from Alzheimer’s disease increased 71 percent from 2000 to 2013. During that time, deaths from heart disease decreased 14 percent.
The Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s epidemic is more widespread than anyone knows. Physicians have withheld millions of diagnoses from patients and their families. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, physicians in the U.S. only inform 45 percent of patients about their Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis. Similar suppression is likely at work in most countries to help shade the epidemic. Meanwhile, millions more go undiagnosed and misdiagnosed.
A groundbreaking study suggested that Alzheimer’s disease causes six times more deaths than official statistics indicate. In reality, the study said Alzheimer’s disease was the underlying cause in more than 500,000 deaths in 2010 that were often attributed to conditions, such as pneumonia, caused by complications of Alzheimer’s. Those numbers make Alzheimer’s disease the third-leading cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer. Researchers at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago led the study and published their results in 2013 in the medical journal Neurology. Governments and industry are working diligently to keep prion disease off the public radar. The epidemic will persist. A cure does not exist. Ignoring the truth is making it worse.
Prions (PREE-ons) are a deadly and unstoppable form of protein that migrates, mutates, multiplies and kills with unparalleled efficiency. Prions cause fatal neurodegenerative disease in humans and other mammals by converting the cellular version of prion protein into a toxic form that erodes the brain and body. Prion disease often is described as a wasting disease that causes a loss of body mass and brain mass.
Dr. Stanley Prusiner, an American neuroscientist from the University of California at San Francisco, earned a Nobel Prize in 1997 for discovering and characterizing prions and prion disease. President Obama awarded Prusiner the National Medal of Science in 2010 to recognize the importance of his research. Important reforms to policies to protect public health, however, have been elusive.
Prion disease also is known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). The operative word is “transmissible.” Prusiner claims that all forms of TSE are caused by infectious prions.
“Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in humans and will pose a considerable challenge to healthcare systems in the coming years,” Prusiner said.
In humans, the prion spectrum includes Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and CJD–the most aggressive version. The difference between these diseases is very slight and often indistinguishable to neurologists. Millions of people have CJD, which is clearly an aggressive prion disease.
Learn more about Dr. Stanley Prusiner and the Nobel Prize for prion science and prion disease.
In humans, most diagnoses are a process of elimination.
- If the patient has a memory disorder, it’s diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease;
- If they have a movement disorder, it’s diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease;
- If the patient shows both symptoms, doctors flip a coin;
- If the patient ever had a concussion, it’s now ruled as CTE;
- If the person is incapacitated, it’s Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and very transmissible;
- If the victim is in the deer family, it’s chronic wasting disease instead of prion disease; and
- If the victim is a beef or dairy cow, it’s called mad cow disease instead of prion disease.
In other mammals, it’s called different things, but prion disease has been found in camels, dolphins, elephants, mink, cats and many other species. The suggestion of a reliable species barrier against thousands, if not millions, of mutations is ludicrous.
