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Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

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This week may be the last week I write to you. In my last letter to you, you may have noticed that I seemed depressed and not like myself. I wasn’t completely truthful in that letter. I’m not just having a bad day, I’m diseased with an incurable, fatal disease. It all started about week after I left the United States, and you. In the airport, in museums, and just walking through the streets of England I would feel lost and confused, forgetting where I had come from and where I was going. Along with losing some of my mental skills, every so often I would trip over my own feet or drop my travel bag, a sign of me slowly losing coordination. Every hour or so, my hands, legs, and feet would begin to tingle and burn. After about a week of suffering with these symptoms I went to a doctor, a primary care provider only, and discussed how I’d been feeling. He suggested I get some more sleep and possibly change my diet. The first thought was that it was just me getting used to another country, time zone, and food. After a few spinal taps and neurological examinations, I was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or human Mad Cow Disease. …show more content…

In both my body and your’s there are these things called prions which occur normally in humans but when folded incorrectly, they are harmful to the body. These incorrectly folded prions then go on and alter other normal prions by actually changing the structure of the prion’s alpha helical regions into beta pleated sheets. If these altered prions are in your brain, they build up in your neurons and cluster together with each other eventually causing neuron loss and other brain damage. This continued brain damage and neuron loss leads to holes in the brain giving it the consistency of a

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