They discover that some injections influenced the transmission of Alzheimer’s

2024-02-02 17:11:03

A new study has shed more light to try to understand what factor or set of factors causes Alzheimer’s disease, the origin of which remains unknown. A team of researchers have now provided more evidence that the now-banned practice of injecting children with growth hormone extracted from the brains of deceased people may also have helped spread Alzheimer’s.

According to the authors of this research, published in Nature Medicinearound 200 children who between 1959 and 1985 underwent these procedures to treat short stature ended up developing Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease decades later, a degenerative and fatal brain condition caused by a misfolded protein known as prion.

Neurologist John Collinge, from the Institute of Prion Diseases at University College London, and his team have long suspected that injections of pituitary-derived growth hormone from cadavers could have transmitted this dementia.

For this reason, they have analyzed the signs of cognitive impairment in eight people who received these injections, but who did not die from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The result has been that five of the eight people subjected to this practice, now prohibited, as children, developed symptoms compatible with Alzheimer’s when they were between 30, 40 and 50 years old. In the other three, one had mild cognitive impairment, the second had cognitive symptoms and the third was asymptomatic.

These results build on an earlier study that revealed that archival samples from these hormone injections contained beta amyloid, the protein believed to be the causative agent of Alzheimer’s disease.

As indicated from Science Alertthis body of research suggests that Alzheimer’s behaves in a prion-like manner, with seeds of degenerated proteins setting off a chain reaction throughout the brain.

This could put Alzheimer’s in the same category as other prion diseases, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (known as mad cow disease). According to the researchers, “the degree to which prion mechanisms are involved in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s may have important implications for therapeutic strategies,” they conclude.