Doctors Discover Clue to a Mysterious Death

When George Balanchine died in 1983, the cause of death was a mystery until doctors analyzed his brain tissue and found that a rare brain disease had killed the famous choreographer.

Scientists now believe that there is a way to accurately diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease--through a spinal tap.

The incurable disease is caused by a virus or some other infectious agent, and it results in slow, progressive loss of mental faculties. The disease has occasionally been transmitted through organ transplants or through doses of growth hormone derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers.

In the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Michael G. Harrington and colleagues from the National Institute of Mental Health say they have isolated four unique proteins that should give physicians their first simple means of diagnosing the brain illness.

They said that by checking for the proteins in spinal fluid, they can distinguish victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from those with Alzheimer’s disease and four other types of dementia that are often confused with one another.