Tag: wasting

Infectious proteins called prions cause a group of related, fatal and incurable neurodegenerative disorders, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy or Mad Cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, both of which affect humans. Chronic wasting disease or CWD, also caused by prions, has reached the point of a global epidemic among deer, elk and members of the deer

Researchers from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have found that continued treatment of muscle wasting with a soluble growth factor receptor protein, produced at the University of Helsinki, improved survival in a pre-clinical cancer model without affecting the tumour size. This effect was not found when the mice were treated with the recombinant protein

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) did not cross the species barrier to infect cynomolgus macaque monkeys during a lengthy investigation by National Institutes of Health scientists exploring risks to humans. CWD is a type of brain-damaging and fatal prion disease found in deer, elk and moose; in humans, prion diseases can take more than a decade