Nasal test developed for prion disorder.

• Position: Neurodegenerative Disease

A nasal brush test rapidly and accurately can diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disorder, according to a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its Italian colleagues. Up until now, a definitive CJD diagnosis required testing brain tissue obtained after death or by biopsy in living patients.

CJD is a prion disease. These originate when, for reasons not fully understood, normally harmless prion protein molecules become abnormal and gather in clusters. Prion diseases affect animals and people. Human prion strains include variant, familial, and sporadic CJD. The most common form, sporadic, affects an estimated one in 1,000,000 people annually worldwide. Other prion diseases include scrapie in sheep; chronic wasting disease in deer, elk, and moose; and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, in cattle.

Scientists have associated the accumulation of these clusters with tissue damage that leaves sponge-like holes in the brain.

"This exciting advance, the culmination of decades of studies on prion diseases, markedly improves on available diagnostic tests for CJD that are less reliable, more difficult for patients to tolerate, and require more time to obtain results," says Anthony S...