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New Technique Revolutionizes Screening Of Human Form Of Mad-Cow Disease PARIS (AFP) - British doctors have devised the world's first non-invasive technique for detecting new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD), the highly feared human form of mad-cow disease, The Lancet reported. So far, 56 Europeans are known to have died from nvCJD, a degenerative and fatal brain ailment contracted by eating beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and some experts fear the toll could rise sharply. However, nvCJD is such a recently discovered disorder that until now the only way of confirming the disease was to examine the brain of a dead patient. Another hypothetical way is to remove a living patient's tonsils for diagnosis, but there are risks arising from anesthesia, surgery and disposing of the tissue afterwards. Neurologists and radiologists from four British institutions say the new screening technique entails using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), focused at high power at a central part of the brain, the posterior thalamus, which is also called the pulvinar. Forms of brain-cell loss typical of nvCJD show up in dark patches on the image. The abnormalities were spotted with 78% accuracy in a scan of 36 patients with nvCJD and 57 control patients without the disease, the experts said. The study involved only patients unwell with nvCJD, and did not investigate whether MRI scanning could identify people who are incubating the disease but do not yet have the symptoms. The doctors are from the National Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh; the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; the Institute of Neurological Sciences, in Glasgow; and the Kent Institute of Medicine and Health Sciences, in Canterbury
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