Can Alzheimer’s Be Catching?

In startling health news Thursday, certain markers for Alzheimer’s showed up in patients who may have developed the disease because they received injections of contaminated hormones. But there are many important qualifications.

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Researchers in the UK who were studying the brains of sufferers who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a neurological disorder, found that those people who died of CJD also had abnormal beta proteins, which are present in Alzheimer’s. These subjects had received human growth hormone from cadavers as a treatment for short stature, which was when abnormal proteins were transmitted.

Between 1958 and 1985, some 1,848 people were given HGH from cadavers, The Independent reports.

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The study, conducted by the UK’s Medical Research Council, found that the cause of CJD in the deaths were “prions,” or abnormal proteins capable of passing on the abnormalities to other proteins. Alzheimer’s is now referred to as a “prion disease.”

Scientists and researchers were quick to point out that the new findings are extremely preliminary, and that one cannot “get” Alzheimer’s simply by being around someone who has it.

The study, published in the journal Nature, looked specifically at eight adults between the ages of 36 and 51. They all died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease after receiving contaminated hormone injections as children.

Doctors probably will now be thinking hard about procedures, and their protocols, that can transmit proteins.

When their brains were studied during autopsy, seven of these people also harbored so-called “mis-folded” proteins that are present in the brains of those who are suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Proteins are chains of molecules that do their jobs by folding into very precise shapes. The proteins observed in the study were not folded correctly.

The scientists did not find the proteins that develop in the later stages of Alzheimer’s in any of the patients, but it may have been because the patients had already succumbed to CJD.

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The sample size of this study is small, and scientists cannot confirm the link between contaminated proteins and these patients’ symptoms of Alzheimer’s in the brain. Additionally, human growth hormone is not given anymore – since 1985 a synthetic version has been used.

But doctors probably will now think hard about procedures – and their protocols – that can transmit proteins. And people who received growth hormone prior to 1985 may be at risk for these mis-folded proteins that may lead to Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Clare Walton, research communications manager at the Alzheimer’s Society, cautioned against hysteria over Alzheimer’s. Dr. Walton said, “No people with medical procedures lined up should be concerned with these headlines. This study didn’t look at any medical procedure that we do today, so to extrapolate from it that they are at risk would be misleading.”

“So [such claims as the headlines have blared in Britain] are misleading and unnecessarily concerning for the public. It affects a lot of people and they will worry a great deal more.”