One of the worst health crises of the late 20th centurye The century – that of growth hormone, whose first victims were children and adolescents – resurfaces with the publication of a British study in the journal Natural medicine, Monday, January 23rd. John Collinge’s team (Institute of Prion Diseases, University College, London) describes five patients who received growth hormone injections before 1985 and who were recently diagnosed with atypical Alzheimer’s disease, which appears to be the origin of this treatment.
To compensate for height deficits, the hormone administered to them was obtained from pituitary glands of deceased people, some of whom were carriers of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). If they had escaped this incurable neurodegenerative disease, which has so far caused the death of more than 4% of the approximately 1,849 young British patients treated in this way between 1959 and 1985, five of the eight described in would be Natural medicine were affected by Alzheimer’s disease at an early age: three died between the ages of 47 and 57. The other five are currently between 54 and 57 years old. Two of them show signs of cognitive decline without a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and the last is asymptomatic.
According to British researchers, this observation suggests that Alzheimer’s disease, like incurable prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, can, in addition to their sporadic or linked occurrence, also take on a transmissible form under certain circumstances.
Deadly aggregates
According to her, this discovery has implications for public health and prevention – “for example, by ensuring effective decontamination of surgical instruments”, you write. However, there is “no proof” that the amyloid beta protein (Aβ), whose accumulation in the form of plaques in the central nervous system is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, can be transmitted in contexts other than this, such as: “in daily life or while performing routine care”calm her down.
Prion diseases arise from the misfolding of a protein whose new conformation propagates through a domino effect on the people in its vicinity, up to and including the formation of deadly aggregates in the central nervous system. Other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are also characterized by the formation of protein aggregates or smaller amino acid chains, peptides such as Aß – so-called “prion-like” active ingredients. (“prion-like”). The study by John Collinge and his colleagues highlights the connections that a growing body of work is making between these two groups of diseases.
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