Alzheimer ’s disease may have been transmitted in now-banned hormone treatments

Alzheimer’s disease can spread via brain tissue from one person to another, according to a new study of several people in the United Kingdom who, as children, were prescribed a now-abandoned hormone therapy treatment. All received years of injections of human growth hormone extracted from pituitary glands in the brains of cadavers. The approach was halted in the mid-1980s after alarming evidence that it could transmit another fatal brain disease. The researchers couldn’t prove the treatment caused Alzheimer’s, although mouse studies have shown that transplanting Alzheimer’s-affected brain tissue can recreate the disease’s pathology in a new brain. But the research could bolster the long-held theory that a particular toxic protein, beta amyloid, is one key to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Although the findings, reported today in Nature Medicine , are intriguing, the public has no reason to worry about “catching” Alzheimer’s, says Carlo Condello, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco who studies neurodegenerative disease. Today, people needing growth hormone therapy are treated with synthetic hormone that doesn’t carry this risk, and neurosurgeries typically use new instruments each time—so direct exposure to another person’s brain tissue is virtually impossible. “I don’t think there’s any condition in normal human life and medical practice” that would put someone at risk, Condello says. T...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research