On the Road to Dementia: Inflammation, Prions, Myositis and Fibromyalgia

File this under "Stuff Nobody Wants to Know" or pay attention - but PLEASE: Do not panic - inform yourself, and use your knowledge to protect your health.

Dementia is already pandemic - and so are a host of chronic diseases that involve inflammation. Fact is, inflammation attracts infectious prions. New research shows (again) that prions colonize muscle in subclinical prion disease, and myositis (muscle inflammation) leads to "enhanced" prion colonization of muscle. The disease process seems to involve a feedback loop. While fibromyalgia often is defined as non-inflammatory, it likely involves chronic sub-clinical inflammation.

Myositis facilitates preclinical accumulation of pathological prion protein in muscle

... Our findings provide new insights into the pathophysiology of PrPSc pointing out that myositis leads to enhanced prion colonization of muscle in subclinical prion disease.

Dr. Oz: Fibromyalgia is a diagnosis based on a grouping of symptoms including fatigue and muscle pain. While the pain and inflammation are very real, this conventional medical diagnosis itself doesn’t help us understand what causes the problem.

Unfortunately, prion science was obstructed a while ago when a specific brain protein was (re)named "prion" (PrP). As a result, only those diseases involving pathological prion protein (PrPSc) in the brain were acknowledged to be prion diseases, diseases caused by prions travelling from the gut to the brain were officially ignored - and all the other prion-related diseases were brushed under the rug.

But focusing only on PrP, it happens that PrPSc (the infectious form) is not only found in the central nervous system, but also in lymphoid organs and muscle. In fact, prions use the immune system to spread through the body. That's how brain prions infect muscle.

The take home message here? Deal with inflammation! True, acute inflammation is a healing thing - but chronic inflammation is not. Common signs are pain and low-grade fever or sweats. But forget the pain - your goal is to stop the inflammation.

Subclinical (silent, systemic, low-grade) inflammation is a form of chronic inflammation (and chances are you’re suffering with it now)

Researchers now recognize that chronic inflammation may be present in a low grade, asymptomatic form for many years before its effects manifest as overt disease. This asymptomatic form of chronic inflammation is often referred to as subclinical inflammation (also silent inflammation, subacute inflammation, low grade inflammation, or systemic inflammation.) Subclinical inflammation can only be detected by laboratory tests or biochemical assays that assess levels of various markers of inflammation such as c-reactive protein, rheumatoid factor, anti-nuclear antibodies, cytokines, or other components, modulators or products of inflammation.

Subclinical inflammation is increasingly recognized as the cause of, or a substantial contributor to, a wide range of ailments, such as for example atherosclerosis, osteoarthritis, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes type 2, Alzheimer’s disease, some cancers, macular degeneration and a great many other ailments. Subclinical inflammation has been shown to increase disease risk, hasten disease onset and worsen disease prognosis. Subclinical inflammation is believed to increase the rate and severity with which signs and symptoms of aging appear.

Stopping Inflammation

Meds usually cause more problems than they fix, so use diet and lifestyle. Usually, the darker the fruit or vegetable, the more antioxidant and anti-inflammatory it will be. Use turmeric, eat blueberries, kale, squash, tomatoes, walnuts, cold water fish, dark chocolate, flax and chia seeds - drink green tea.

Specifics vary from diet to diet, but in general anti-inflammatory diets suggest:

Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Minimize saturated and trans fats.
Eat a good source of omega-3 fatty acids, such as fish or fish oil supplements and walnuts.
Watch your intake of refined carbohydrates such as pasta and white rice.
Eat plenty of whole grains such as brown rice and bulgur wheat.
Eat lean protein sources such as chicken; cut back on red meat and full-fat dairy foods.
Avoid refined foods and processed foods.
Spice it up. Ginger, curry, and other spices can have an anti-inflammatory effect.

More:

Reducing inflammation — the natural approach
5 anti-inflammatory foods
Anti-inflammatory Diet: Road to Good Health?
Three natural anti-inflammatory agents to know

Check out this thread from Never Despise too.
Dementia is the next global pandemic, says Aids prevention pioneer

Accepted dogma used to be that the prion diseases lacked an inflammatory response in the brain but by 2001, the prion-inflammation link was clear. Now, research describing prion links to inflammation are becoming more common.

10. Central Nervous System Inflammation and Prion Disease Pathogenesis

The study of inflammation in the prion diseases is relatively new. Indeed, for a number of years the accepted dogma was that the prion diseases lacked an inflammatory response in the brain (1–3). This persists in spite of a number of studies showing that the pathological hallmarks of the prion diseases (PrPSc deposition, astrocytosis, vacuolation, and neuronal loss) are associated with the presence of activated microglia (4–7). At the heart of this discrepancy is a simple matter of what is meant by inflammation. The innate inflammatory response is the tissue’s response to injury or infection, and, as so succinctly put by Metchnikoff in the late ninetenth century, “The essential and primary element in typical inflammation consists in a reaction of the phagocytes against a harmful agent” (8). Given that the microglia are the brain’s resident macrophages (i.e., phagocytic cells), we believe that the presence of activated microglia in prion-affected brains represents an inflammatory response (9–11).
Affiliation(s): (1) CNS Inflammation Group, School of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Book Title: Molecular Pathology of the Prions

Brain Inflammation Likely Key Initiator to Prion and Parkinson's Disease

…researchers of the Computational Biology group at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine showed that neuro-inflammation plays a crucial role in initiating prion disease.

Prion diseases represent a family of neurodegenerative disorders associated with the loss of brain cells and caused by proteins called prions (derived from ‘protein’ and ‘infection’). The diseases are found in both humans and animals, such as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and mad cow disease respectively. Although mostly harmless, prions can transform into infectious agents, which accumulate in the brain and destroy the nervous tissue.
But how exactly does the accumulation of prions cause destruction of the brain? “Understanding the process by which prions destroy neurons is critical for finding a cure for prion disease”, says Isaac Crespo, first author of the publication. He and his colleagues tackled this question with a computational approach: They ran their own computer programmes on experimental data generated by other research groups, and identified a set of 16 proteins that seems to control the onset of the disease. Interestingly, almost all of these proteins have known functions in neuro-inflammation.

fibromyalgia is miss DXed many times.

in some cases its Small Fiber Polyneuropathy caused by a autoimmune disorder or something like metabolic syndrone.

SFN is associated with a wide variety of diseases and disorders including diabetes, thyroid issues, sarcoidosis, vitamin B12 deficiency, HIV, neurotoxic medications (including chemotherapy and antiretroviral agents), celiac disease, Sjogren’s Syndrome, Lupus. With all these disorders, about 50% of SFN diagnoses are ‘idiopathic’; i.e., no discernible cause is found.

www.cortjohnson.org... /

I got mine from having sarcoidosis.

www.medscape.com...

In most cases doctors are doing blood test to DX fibro and not doing a skin test for small fiber polyneuropathy.
This leaves the patent with a life long disability instead of getting early treatment that would have stopped the Polyneuropathy early while it was still treatable.

This is because of doctors working for the insurance industry that have claimed fibro was a psychiatric disorder so that the insurance industry had to pay a lot less for treating these people.
www.prohealth.com...

reply to post by soficrow


I fought with inflammation related disease for well over a decade. Became "permanently" disabled, with the regular western medical community and big pharma throwing literally everything they had at me. Of course, this was after many years of searching for what was wrong, but that's a whole 'nother story.

I have been healthy now for just over two years. The two things I did? I got off all the medications (over $3,000 a month at one point ) and I delved into mind/body connection and energy work.

Great thread - hope it helps a lot of folks. For those suffering, I also recommend exploring alternative treatments and healing if you are open to it. They saved my life.

reply to post by ANNED

...doctors working for the insurance industry that have claimed fibro was a psychiatric disorder so that the insurance industry had to pay a lot less for treating these people.

Yes, but they've also been terrified to acknowledge that fibromyalgia might be a stage or manifestation of prion disease. Prions scare the poop out of medical people and Big Pharma - especially since many meds seem to create prions.

reply to post by soficrow

On the Road to Dementia: Inflammation, Prions, Myositis and Fibromyalgia

I lost an elderly parent back in May (2013) to what was a long, downhill journey. My mother, who had survived the Great Depression, losing a husband in WW2 and raising two boys on her own in a day when single mothers were horribly frowned upon, finally succumbed... with this most despicable of ailments; dementia, taking her down the entire way.

I had many suspicions (and still do) as to the cause but... they carried no weight as there was nothing I could do. When I brought a local Hospice in, they helped me do the best we could to simply ease the torture. I tried many of what might be called 'homeopathic' treatments but nothing really had any enduring, positive effect.

After a life of 90 years of incredible health during most every phase of her life, the end was just wrong... and I feel guilty to this day still that I could do nothing.

I hope than none of you EVER have to travel this path.

reply to post by Open2Truth

Great thread - hope it helps a lot of folks. For those suffering, I also recommend exploring alternative treatments and healing if you are open to it. They saved my life.

Thanks. Modern medicine and Big Pharma are flummoxed when it comes to prions - they don't know what to do because all their dogma just can't accommodate the little critters. A complete reconceptualization and rewrite is needed before Western medicine can move forward on this one.

reply to post by redoubt

After a life of 90 years of incredible health during most every phase of her life, the end was just wrong... and I feel guilty to this day still that I could do nothing.

I hope than none of you EVER have to travel this path.

Everyone I know or have spoken with who has a loved one with dementia says pretty much the same thing. And all fear going the same way too. Unfortunately, the old wives were right -

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Which is why we need to clean up our world and protect our food supply.

reply to post by ANNED

In most cases doctors are doing blood test to DX fibro

Not in all cases.

My old doctor asked me three questions and slapped me with a fibro diagnosis. Are you tired when you awake in the morning? Do you have pain? Does your back hurt? That was all it took.

I have never agreed with this diagnosis. I tried the meds per my specialist's recommendations, and they never helped, then I got yelled at for stopping the meds, as if I should have continued to pay 500 a month for prescriptions that made me feel worse, or pay 400 for an appointment with him to get permission (as if I need it to begin with) to stop taking them.



For the OP:

Do you think there is a prion connection to Rheumatoid Arthritis (or any other form of autoimmune, inflammatory arthritis or spondyloarthropathy)? It has a reasonably high co-morbidity with Fibro, as many autoimmune diseases do, so I'm curious. I've rarely spoken to anyone with RA, that didn't also say they had FMS (or CFS on occasion).

reply to post by daryllyn


A genetic disease does not have to manifest and the disease should be able to revert if the reason for the disease is eliminated. Many of these diseases are caused by eating food we should not be eating for our genetics.

The B complex they add to flour comes from the excretions of brewers yeast. Not everyone can eat these forms of B vitamins, they do not match some of our genetics. Enriched makes some doctors rich. On top of that we are making the bread differently than we did before, not letting it rise for long periods of time, choosing instead rapidly growing yeast that may have different excretions than we are used to. Top that off with increasing gluten in the wheats and changing the wheat genetics by selective breeding for best possible growth and we have a mess.

Above is only one example. Some B vitamins work by creating energy through a histamine reaction. Everything about bread is histamine producing. When we keep stimulating reactions this causes inflammation. If we do not stimulate these reactions at all than we can build up too much chemistry in our body and the body can overreact to something causing serious problems.

It sounds like this inflammation fuels prion growth also which accentuates the problem even farther. If the body is making too much antihistamines to combat the histamines, the antihistamines can also cause a loss of protection of the body. The balance of all this is critical, all we can do is to examine how not to get too far off the centerpoint either way. This keeps us healthy. If they would quit changing food and the way they process it, we might be able to adapt and return to fighting these things properly. The everchanging chemistry we use in the food industry is causing much problems. They do not have to list chemicals used in the production of the food, these chemicals are neutralized....but the changes to the food are present.

daryllyn
reply to post by ANNED

 

For the OP:

Do you think there is a prion connection to Rheumatoid Arthritis (or any other form of autoimmune, inflammatory arthritis or spondyloarthropathy)? It has a reasonably high co-morbidity with Fibro, as many autoimmune diseases do, so I'm curious. I've rarely spoken to anyone with RA, that didn't also say they had FMS (or CFS on occasion).

Yes, I do. If not causal then definitely with regard to progression. There's some research out there showing links. Here's one bit referring to spondyloarthropathy (diseases of the joints and spine).

2000: HLA-B27 misfolding: a solution to the spondyloarthropathy conundrum?

Compelling evidence indicates that HLA-B27 is directly involved in the etiopathogenesis of the spondyloarthropathies (SpAs). ...Recent work demonstrating that HLA-B27 misfolds offers a novel alternative hypothesis. Here, we review this new information on the folding and assembly of HLA-B27, and discuss consequences of misfolding that could be relevant to the pathogenesis of SpAs.

PRION 2009: HLA-B27 misfolding and spondyloarthropathies

...In this chapter we will review what has been learned about HLA-B27 misfolding in human cells and in the transgenic rat model of spondyloarthritis-like disease, considering it in the context of other protein misfolding disorders. ...

...Preliminary data indicating that HLA-B27 misfolding may be a stimulus for activating the IL-23/IL-17 axis, suggests a novel mechanism that may explain, at least in part, the role of HLA-B27 in colitis in transgenic rats. The striking convergence of the human genetic data and results from HLA-B27 transgenic rats provides a compelling argument that this axis needs to be further examined in SpA and AS.

reply to post by daryllyn


PS. Also note that infectious misfolded proteins are prions by the old definition. There is some controversy regarding nomenclature and their infectivity but it's all mostly damage control.

rickymouse
A genetic disease does not have to manifest and the disease should be able to revert if the reason for the disease is eliminated. Many of these diseases are caused by eating food we should not be eating for our genetics.

I believe the "genetics" excuse is simply to try and convince people that there is nothing they can do to prevent the disease, so they should accept it as "normal" and hand over their cash for "help".

As I said in the other thread, my belief is that a lifetime of drinking electrically conductive (contaminated) water causes the cerebrospinal fluid that the brain is immersed in to become conductive as well. Since the brain is like an electronic circuit board, this causes it to short circuit.

For those who know someone with dementia, try giving them distilled water to drink. It's cheap and you have nothing to lose, and possible something to gain.

Fascinating, thanks for sharing it with us. I would contend with two small points, however. Since minimizing inflammation seems to be the best course of action in slowing the onset of this nastyness, suggesting that switching from red meat to chicken and fish is a bit irresponsible. Chicken is one of the highest-known sources of arichodonic acid, which is the main cause of inflammation. It is #1 on a list of the highest common food sources. Fish was #5. Check this out:

(All of these videos are heavily-cited from peer-reviewed journals, it's is all perfectly legitimate)



- note - the levels of arichodonic acid have nothing to do with wild, farm-raised, factory-raised, organic, etc.

Here's another video on arichodonic acid:




Again, in this epidemiology study, fish consumption had no measureable impact on the incidence of deaths caused by inflammation-related diseases. video

One more great video on solutions: (I'm a big fan of Dr. Michael Greger, if it isn't abundantly obvious already)


I don't want to come across as a zealot, but the ever-growing body of scientific literature is showing clear trends emerging - meat consumption is linked to an increase in almost every category of disease, and plant consumption is linked to a decrease in almost every category of disease.

reply to post by rickymouse

A genetic disease does not have to manifest and the disease should be able to revert if the reason for the disease is eliminated.

You seem to be confusing epigenetics with genetics. Even diagnosed prion diseases are only 5%-15% inherited, and fewer still involve genetic change - most are epigenetic.

reply to post by soficrow


Thanks for the sources. I'm still trying to get through the second one... I'm glad I have chemistry, anatomy one and two, biology one and two, and med term one and two under my belt because, it's a pretty technical read.

I haven't been given the test for HLA-B27 yet, but I will be asking for it, because I feel like RA might not be right, either. As my research has gone on, I have to wonder why HLA-B27 wasn't part of my original lab work in the beginning, as it seems to be pretty standard from what I have come to understand.

Anyway, thanks for the new point to research from.. should keep me busy for a while

reply to post by Son of Will


It seems clear that our entire food system is contaminated - with actual prions, and with agents that cause proteins to mis-fold and become prions. Given this, our best defence is to eat a varied diet. For obvious reasons, I do not support the idea that eating vegetarian is intrinsically protective:
Prions Found in Plants.

Also, I do not promote using supplements of any kind - few people know enough to about when to start, stop and/or adjust the dosage. As far as arachidonic acid goes, a) there are 2 kinds, only one of which is inflammatory, and b) anything taken in excess can have bad effects.

reply to post by daryllyn


Just so you know, HLA-B27 misfolding likely results from an epigenetic mechanism and environmental response (NOT genetic cause) - and does seem implicated in RA. I doubt an HLA-B27 test will help you personally - likely won't change your diagnosis or treatment (but might add to some researcher's body of research evidence).

...I do sympathize with you - I started my own journey on this over a decade ago because I could not get answers or treatment, and I was losing everything to my illness. It's been a wild ride and it's changed me - not just my expectations and hopes, but in terms of how I understand disease. Like any truly worthy endeavour, it's all about going down the rabbit hole.

reply to post by NuclearPaul

I believe the "genetics" excuse is simply to try and convince people that there is nothing they can do to prevent the disease, so they should accept it as "normal" and ...

REWRITE (If I may): the "genetics" excuse is simply to try and convince people that there is nothing they can do to prevent the disease, so they should accept it as "normal," bow to the Eugenics paradigm and agree to euthanasia.

Disease is NOT evidence of genetic weakness - it is evidence of exposure.