Dementia-like disease sickened more than 40 people in Canada

Doctors in Canada are puzzled by a group of people with a dementia-like brain disorder with no known diagnosis. Over the past half-decade, dozens of New Brunswickers are believed to have developed the disease, which includes symptoms such as memory loss, changes in behavior and hallucinations. He is still afind out if these cases are actually linked or what the cause could be.

CBC News reported This month, New Brunswick health officials sent a memo in early March to area physicians for the cluster. According to the memo, the probable first One case of this mysterious disease was reported in 2015. To date, 43 suspected cases have been identified, including six in 2021, across all age groups. So far, five people have died.

Aside from memory and mental problems, symptoms include muscle wasting, pain, and spasms. On the surface, the disease appears to resemble a prion disease—Neurological disorders caused by unwanted proteins that build up in the brain and slowly destroy it. But medical examinations have so far found no evidence of prions in these patients. Prion disease is also universally fatal, usually within months to a year after the first symptoms appear, but the symptoms of this disease have developed in 18 to 36 months in patients found so far, while five people with the disease have died.

The only clear connections between these patients are their common symptoms without easily explicable origin, as well as their proximity, with cases found in to the northeast and southeastern New Brunswick. The geographic The connection could suggest an environmental cause unique to these areas, such as exposure to a toxin. But it is always possible that some or all of these cases are not really related.

For now, officials and scientists are scrambling to uncover the disease’s potential origins and whether something can be done to contain its spread if it is transmissible.

“It is possible that ongoing investigations will give us the cause in a week, or it is possible that it will give us the cause in a year,” Brian Cashman, professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of British Columbia and one of the researchers involved in the cluster study, Told CBC News recently. “There is no reasonable time frame that I can provide when we get a response. It’s just something that needs to be the center of scientific attention, and as quickly as possible. “