WIKIMEDIA, US NAVYThousands of Europeans may be asymptomatic carriers of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), a fatal prion disease that is the human variant of Mad Cow disease. But now, two studies published December 21 in Science Translational Medicine describe new methods for detecting even latent vCJD, which could make blood transfusions safer and help early detection and treatment of the disease.
The blood tests accurately diagnosed 32 patients between the two studies, distinguishing those with the disease from 391 healthy controls. In both cases, the tests were 100 percent sensitive and 100 percent specific and, in one of the studies, the test managed to identify vCJD prion particles in a blood donation more than a year before the onset of symptoms—a first for prion disease detection.
“There is new technology to go forward, and it looks promising,” Jonathan Wadsworth, a prion disease expert at University College London, who was not involved in the study, told Science. “These are definitely very welcome papers.”
Luis Concha-Marambio of the University of Texas Houston Medical School and colleagues developed one blood test and tested it on 14 individuals with vCJD ...
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