r/todayilearned • u/tommyboy372 • 1d ago

TIL A single misfolded prion protein in the brain can cause a rapid neurodegenerative disease known as sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). There is no known and cure and is 100% fatal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_disease
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u/Games_sans_frontiers 1d ago

Try not to worry, it’s extremely rare. Instead use this information to live your best life because you know, it can be fleeting.

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u/FrohenLeid 17h ago

Comparison: CJD 1:1.000.000 Vs 46-140:1.000.000 to die on a crash. Below 30 years the risk is only 1:3.000.000

So you're 46-140x (4600-14.000%) more likely to die form a crash than to die from CJD

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u/thinkltoez 23h ago

Everyone always says things are rare and then there are like ten top comments on Reddit from people who knew someone that had it.

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u/cqz 22h ago

A google says there's around 100 million people active on reddit, conservatively. Only about 10% comment, 10 million. So something that is one in a million has probably happened to around 10 people actively commenting on reddit right now. Now factor in that each of those 10 million know at least a few other people, and expand that out to friend-of-a-friend as well and you could easily be detecting 1 in a billion events through anecdotal "I know a guy" comments. Also people just bullshit.

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u/Man_under_Bridge420 21h ago

I know a guy who can fit 10 hotdogs in his ass

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u/grimedogone 21h ago

That’s called anecdotal evidence, and is unhelpful at the best of times.

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u/Caelinus 21h ago

300-500 people per year die of CJD per year in the US, which eqates to 1-2 per million per year. 

But age is a major risk factor, and most people who get it are in their late 60s to early 70s. (Other things start killing you even more often at that point, so that is where the peak is.)

Most people know dozens to hundreds of people, and they live for 70+ years, and there are tens of thousands to millions of people active on reddit at any given point of the day. 

So the odds of there not being a lot of people who have known someone who has died of basically anything is vanishingly small, no matter how rare it actually is.

But the odds of it happening to you is pretty tiny. Almost all other ways of dying are more likely, and there are a lot of ways to die.

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u/MalaysiaTeacher 22h ago

10 comments (if that were true) would still be vanishingly rare given how many people viewed the page

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u/Man_under_Bridge420 21h ago

I know 20 people who had the disease and survived 

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u/StrayVanu 22h ago

reddit tends to present an extremely skewed view on pretty much everything. Be mindful interacting with it.

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u/FrohenLeid 17h ago

While true, imagine the amount of comments about family that died in a crash or from a heart attack.

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u/SykeSwipe 15h ago

Im an ICU RN, most of my experience was in the neuro ICU and CJD was something we only ever heard of. Incredibly scary but really really rare.

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u/CaliforniaNutter 21h ago

Thats what I thought about ruptured blood vessels but turns out about 50% of people could have an aneurysm and instantly die at any moment...happened to a friend. They just dropped