Brain Diseases

This is about Ashley's dignity. Everybody examining her case seems to agree at least about that. Ashley is a 9-year-old girl who has static encephalopathy, a severe brain impairment. She cannot walk or talk. She cannot keep her head up, roll over or sit up by herself. She is fed with a tube. Her parents call her "Pillow Angel" because she stays right where they place her, usually on a pillow.

Re "Tragedy follows landmark court win," March 16 The judges who ruled that Kanuri Qawi could refuse treatment displayed the power of stigma. Courts have been reluctant to unplug life-support systems until they have medical evidence that a comatose patient has no chance of survival. Has any court made it impossible to obtain treatment for a person who is unconscious from a heart attack or in a diabetic coma? Clearly, there is a double standard when only those with brain diseases are being given a choice to refuse medication during a medical crisis.

Scientists reported Monday that they had found a way to identify master cells in the brains of mice and grow them in large batches -- a potential way to help patients grow their own brain tissue transplants. The scientists, writing in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said they found a process to make the cells multiply, which would be crucial in fighting degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's and Huntington's.

Federal regulators Thursday approved what would be the first transplant of fetal stem cells into human brains. The transplant recipients will be children who suffer from a rare, fatal genetic disorder. The Food and Drug Administration said that doctors at Stanford University Medical Center could begin the testing on six children afflicted with Batten disease, a degenerative malady that renders its young victims blind, speechless and paralyzed before it kills them.

Finally, a light at the end of childhood. Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and UCLA have been exploring how human minds mature, when they do. It's tricky enough just to live this journey, let alone to track it medically for 17 years. The researchers found that parts of the brain's 100 billion neurons matured at different times.

Researchers have for the first time made a prion in the laboratory and used it to demonstrate that the misfolded proteins are indeed the sole cause of mad cow disease, the American and German scientists said Thursday.

The hottest trend in medical research on Alzheimer's disease is finding ways to delay the progression of the disease--to in effect extend the life of human memory--instead of waiting for a cure. With a special sense of urgency, scientists fear that a wave of Alzheimer's cases will become the great public health menace of the next century. Today's 4 million victims of Alzheimer's could become an army of 14 million by the middle of the next century.

Japanese scientists have found an important role played by a brain protein linked to "mad cow disease" and a related human illness. Bacteriologist Shigeru Katamine of the Nagasaki School of Medicine reported in the April 11 issue of Nature that mice genetically bred so they did not have the proteins, called prions, showed symptoms markedly similar to the deadly brain infection and the human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Four states will begin tracking a mysterious brain illness in Americans as a precaution after Britain's mad cow disease scare. Doctors at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said there is no sign that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is occurring more frequently among Americans. Nor has mad cow disease been detected in the United States. Surveillance of the illness will begin immediately in Minnesota, California, Connecticut and Oregon, the disease center announced.

At first, Carol Marie Vanetti had trouble walking. Then came the long pauses in her conversations. One day she became so dizzy a friend called 911. The doctors sent her to UC San Francisco for tests. The diagnosis: The 58-year-old retired Stockton school counselor had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an ailment similar to the "mad cow disease" plaguing cattle in Great Britain. In two weeks, she fell into a coma. In two more weeks, Vanetti was dead.