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Dynamical Monte Carlo Approach to the Incubation Time of Prionic Diseases

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Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)

Abstract

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are neurodegenerative diseases for which prions are the attributed pathogenic agents. A widely accepted theory assumes that prion replication is due to a direct interaction between the pathologic (PrPSc) form and the host-encoded (PrPC) conformation, in a kind of autocatalytic process. Our recent work Phys. Rev. Lett. 90(19), 198101, 2003 shows that the overall features of the incubation time of prion diseases are readily obtained if the prion reaction is described by a simple mean-field model. An analytical expression for the incubation time distribution then follows by associating the rate constant to a stochastic variable log normally distributed. The incubation time distribution is then also shown to be log-normal and fits the observed BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) data very well. Here, we test epidemic-like models in order to verify the influence of local interactions in the incubation time distribution. Computer simulations using Dynamical Monte Carlo approach are carried out to obtain the time distributions.

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