DAILY MAIL
Alzheimer’s can ‘spread BETWEEN humans’: Groundbreaking study reveals at least five people have ‘caught’ memory-robbing illness from discontinued hormone treatment – and scientists warn hundreds more are ‘at risk’
- Children were given growth hormones and later developed early-onset dementia
- Alzheimer’s is caused by a toxic amyloid-beta protein building up in the brain
Alzheimer’s can spread between humans, a groundbreaking study revealed today.
Experts have found evidence of at least five people ‘catching’ the memory-robbing disorder from now-banned hormone treatments.
The patients were among 1,848 people injected with growth hormones riddled with toxic amyloid-beta protein ‘seeds’, or prions, as children.
All five came down with the same rare early-onset form of the devastating dementia condition.
Others who received the same treatment are now considered ‘at risk’.
Between 1958 and 1985, abnormally short children in the US and the UK were given hormones harvested from cadavers to help spur their growth.
The technique was then banned and doctors instead used synthetic hormones after it emerged that some batches were contaminated with prions that led to a fatal and incurable brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
Academics now believe other medical and surgical procedures might carry a risk of spreading Alzheimer’s as prions — which accumulate in the brain and kill neurons —can survive hospital sterilisation methods…
