Earlier this year, a groundbreaking paper revealed that Alzheimer’s disease was passed between five patients that underwent a now-banned hormone procedure.
The five people described in the paper were treated when they were children with a type of human growth hormone which had been extracted from pituitary glands from deceased individuals.
According to UCL, this was used to treat at least 1,848 people in the UK between 1959 and 1985, and used for cases of short stature.
Eight people who had received the treatment were referred to UCLH’s National Prion Clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. Five of those people had symptoms of dementia, and either had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or would otherwise meet the diagnostic criteria for this condition; another person met criteria for mild cognitive impairment.
UCL said: “These people were between 38 and 55 years old when they started having neurological symptoms.
“Biomarker analyses supported the diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease in two patients with the diagnosis, and was suggestive of Alzheimer’s in one other person; an autopsy analysis showed Alzheimer’s pathology in another patient.
“The unusually young age at which these patients developed symptoms suggests they did not have the usual sporadic Alzheimer’s which is associated with old age. In the five patients in whom samples were available for genetic testing, the team ruled out inherited Alzheimer’s disease.”
The lead author of the research, Professor John Collinge, Director of the UCL Institute of Prion Diseases and a consultant neurologist at UCLH, said: “We’re not suggesting for a moment you can catch Alzheimer’s disease. This is not transmissible in the sense of a viral or bacterial infection,
“It’s only when people have been accidentally inoculated, essentially, with human tissue or extracts of human tissue containing these seeds, which is thankfully a very rare and unusual circumstance.”
So, the risk of ‘catching’ Alzheimer’s disease is very low and researchers aren’t concerned about it easily passing through humans. This group were simply very unlucky.