Possible Underascertainment of Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease: a Systematic Study

To predict the size of the vCJD epidemic it is important to know whether the description of cases of vCJD in 1996 represent the first cases of a new disease entity or whether detection was due to increased surveillance of CJD in humans. Detection of earlier cases would suggest a shorter incubation period & might lead to predictions of epidemic size being revised. The study found that variant CJD is a new disease entity & not simply the result of better case ascertainment. (17 refs)