Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Could eating the brain of a deceased person protect your own mind from the effects of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other neurological conditions? While doctors would almost certainly not recommend it, doing so may have helped one tribe develop a protective mutation.
In new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers at the UCL Institute of Neurology’s MRC Prion Unit and their colleagues studied the Fore people, a previously isolated tribe in Papua New Guinea that had a long tradition of eating their dead at funerals.
These mortuary feasts, The Washington Post explained, “wreaked havoc” on the survivors as the brains they consumed contained a deadly molecule that caused an incurable neurodegenerative disorder known as kuru. At one point, kuru killed two percent of the population each year, and it wasn’t until mortuary feasts were banned in the 1950s that the epidemic started to recede.
Mortuary feats apparently gave rise to a genetic variant
However, the Fore people went on to develop a genetic resistance to prions, the molecules responsible for fatal brain diseases like kuru and some types of dementia if and when they become deformed. The authors of the new study have identified this gene, and their research may shed new light on these diseases, as well as conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
According to Nature, lead investigator John Collinge, a prion researcher from University College London, and his colleagues, discovered that an amino-acid change can occur in a nucleotide sequence in one part of the prion protein (a region called codon 127). This created a new genetic variant that conveyed complete resistance to kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in mice.
The mutation, the authors explained, appears to provide protection by preventing prion proteins from becoming deformed. They reportedly discovered it by examining the DNA of Fore families who were exposed to kuru several times during mortuary feasts, but did not contract the disease. Now, Collinge and his colleagues are trying to learn more about this phenomenon with the hopes that they can learn more about how misshapen proteins can adversely impact the brain.
“This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia,” Collinge told Reuters on Wednesday. He added that this genetic mutation had not been seen “anywhere else in the world,” according to The Washington Post.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest.
Comments