The key to curing dementia may lie with a brain-eating tribe in Papua New Guinea

Dementia is a big problem that's little understood, and cases of Alzheimer's disease and other types of dementia are only going to balloon as people live longer. Researchers report in the journal Nature that they have identified a genetic mutation in the brain that appears to protect people from prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). But prions, or misshapen proteins, are also believed to play a big role in dementia diseases like Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's.

The British and Papua New Guinean researchers looked at the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who apparently developed their prion resistance during an outbreak of kuru, a CJD-like prion disease spread by a mostly abandoned practice of eating a relative's brain and nervous system at the funeral. At its peak in the 1950s, kuru killed about 2 percent of the Fore population each year. Some Fore people developed a protective mutation in codon 127 of the prion protein, the researchers say, and it makes them completely resistant to all forms of CJD.

"This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia," said John Collinge, a prion researcher at University College London who led the study. The team is now researching the mutant protein's molecular structure, hoping to find helpful clues to understanding and curing prion diseases that cause dementia and other neural problems.

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