What are prions?

Question

my docter said i have them

what are they? what do they do and what are symptems

Answer 1

I sincerely doubt what you are saying.  No credible physician would make the diagnosis of prion disease because a patient has a lump on the arm.  If indeed you have a lump on your arm following an injection, and if it is very sore, then you might be developing an abscess and need to be on antibiotics.

Answer 2

sorry to hear that

prions are proteins which have missfolded

this is bad because they can build up and also form other proteins into prions

if they build up too much and in the wrong place (like your brain) you can get diseases like alzheimer's disease

Answer 3

I don't think you have a prion, maybe you should verify with another doctor.

Prions basically function like viruses, except that they're a protein. They 'fold' into your body's various protein structures and mess everything up.

What makes them dangerous is that scientists haven't been able to find a way to identify them easily, since prions are literally just strands of protein. Worst of all, they don't denature easily, meaning that they are hard to break apart.

And yes, Mad-Cow Disease (Creuzdfeldt-Jakob Disease) is caused by a Prion.

Prion comes from the words Proteinaceous and infectious

Answer 4

Prions are thought to cause a number of diseases in a variety of mammals, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as "mad cow disease") in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. All thus-far hypothesized prion diseases affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue, and all are currently untreatable and are always fatal. In general usage, prion can refer to both the theoretical unit of infection or the specific protein (e.g. PrP) that is thought to be the infective agent, whether or not it is in an infective state.

Prions are hypothesized to infect and propagate by refolding abnormally into a structure which is able to convert normal molecules of the protein into the abnormally structured form. All known prions induce the formation of an amyloid fold, in which the protein polymerises into an aggregate consisting of tightly packed beta sheets. This altered structure is extremely stable and accumulates in infected tissue, causing cell death and tissue damage. This stability means that prions are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents, making disposal and containment of these particles difficult.