Does lack of copper trigger CJD?

For someone like me with a family full of dead fCJD victims, I wonder every day what the trigger is. Does something trigger CJD? Or does a lack of something trigger CJD? Here’s a great new study out of North Carolina State University that says a lack of copper can contribute to the misfolding of prions. This is just the kind of stuff that makes my day!

From the Science Blog link above:

“We believe that a prion protein’s normal function is to serve as a copper buffer in the human body, binding with copper ions and keeping those ions from damaging human tissue,” Hodak says. “We wanted to determine whether this was the normal function of the prion, and then look at how that binding affected the prion’s structure.”

To me, the prion’s normal function is to kill my family members. Brilliant scientific minds have the power to change this.

I so look forward to this being solved in my lifetime. To all the great researchers, please keep up the good work. You are ALL my rock stars.

Thank you.