Guest guest Posted January 21, 1999 Report Share Posted January 21, 1999 Hello everybody, My name is o Vasconcelos dos Santos. I am a brazilian physicist and I work at the Universidade Federal de Alagoas, in Maceio, state of Alagoas, in the northeastern part of Brazil.Lately I have been involved in the research subject of prion diseases, together with a biology student named Marcio Lins Galdino. We have studied the kinectics (time evolution) of the prions conversion reaction, under the hipothesis that the organism can not distinguish the normal prion from the misfolded one and that the genetic machinery responsible for the production of normal prions, somehow keeps the density of prions constant. We called this hipothesis a " conservation law " of the prions density. With very few additional hipothesis we have been able to study the production of misfolded prions with time, after a small innoculation dose at time t=0, and our results reproduce many of the known facts associated with prions diseases, such as: very long incubation time;very short post-symptomatic survivle time; the correct dependence of the incubation time on the innoculation dose; independence of the survivle time on the innoculation dose; longer incubation time for inter-species contamination,etc. From our results we could correlate the evolution of the disease with the heat production in the prions conversion reaction what lead us to suppose that the neuron killing agent, responsible for the spongiform aspect of the infected brains is the heat generated in the conversion reaction. The point is that the power (heat per unit time) generated in the conversion reaction is very small during a long time (the incubation time) and suddenly increases very steeply during a short time ( the symptomatic period). We suppose that it is during that sudden power increase that the damage to the brain is produced leading to the death of the infected victim. We have presented our results im many scientific meetings in Brazil, both national and international and the scientific community has received it well. Presently we are trying to publish our paper. If anyone wants to receive a pre-print copy of it, please contact me. I will be very glad to discuss our results with interested people. Greetings to everybody.... o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted January 21, 1999 Report Share Posted January 21, 1999 o: I would be very interested in reading this study. Am I correct in assuming that you believe that the source of exposure to this disease directly correlates with the length of illness? I've often wondered why the variations in symptomatic periods of CJD. Liz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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