Sentences with phrase «fatal human brain disease»

Not exact matches

To investigate, Walker Jackson of the Whitehead Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues created mice with a mutation associated with the human prion disease Fatal Familial Insomnia and injected some of their brain tissue into the brains of mice without the mutation.

Several fatal neurological diseases — including Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and scrapie in sheep — are marked by the accumulation of protein deposits in the brain.

For nearly 30 years, researchers have gathered evidence that a group of bizarre, fatal brain diseases — including mad cow and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease — are caused not by a virus or bacterium but by an abnormal form of a protein, called a prion.

Researchers are reporting what they say is the most compelling evidence, to date, that the infectious proteins called prions that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or «mad cow» disease, have infected humans, causing fatal brain degeneration.

Prion diseases are a group of rare, fatal brain diseases that affect animals and humans.