A new study has found that Alzheimer’s disease is ‘transmitted’ like prions

Health – They were contaminated by their medicines. According to a British study, extractable growth hormone taken from the pituitary gland of cadaver for therapeutic use may transmit Alzheimer’s cases to many patients. The hypothesis not only reopens the page of one of the biggest French and European health scandals, it redefines a disease that was considered non-communicable.

The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine This was conducted on Monday, January 29, in Great Britain. The subject of the research is the fate of eight patients, who in the 1980s (like thousands of young French people at the time) received extractive growth hormones. Three decades later, all are sick, and seven out of eight have many symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Coincidence? Very unlikely.

Prion parallels

Tests showed that the patients had nothing in their DNA that predisposed them to the disease. Then, their pathways, the diseases they developed, the treatments they received were by no means uniform: to put it another way, the only source identified for disease development was these extractive growth hormones. The same people who caused the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease scandal both in France and across the Channel. And for good reason.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is caused by a prion, which is not a virus but a protein. Naturally present in the human body, it – like any protein – folds on itself, and this is where the danger comes from. Prions become extremely destructive when they are misfolded. This pathogenic form then causes transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. It is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, mad cow disease in cattle, and scrapie in sheep.

What does this have to do with Alzheimer’s? Also at the heart of the disease is a misfolded protein, amyloid beta peptide (also spelled beta-amyloid). Since the 1990s, we have noticed that it is present in higher amounts in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, along with another protein that becomes defective and accumulates (after a long incubation period) or short), called tau.

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However, researchers from University College London (UCL) are clear: the accumulation of β-amyloid protein, and in some Tau patients, is only consistent with the so-called “iatrogenic” transmission, that is – by medicine. Here are the pituitary extracts, some of which were probably contaminated. In other words, Alzheimer’s would be “transmissible” like a prion, not like a virus.

This may not surprise those at the forefront of the issue: In 2015, a study by the same team showed that many deaths from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease who had received growth hormones had accumulated β-amyloid. At the time, there was therefore a serious hypothesis that Alzheimer’s could be transmitted. But doubts remained, as there was no evidence that the disease had actually broken out. For patients studied in 2023, this has now been done.

Is this a new health problem? Not sure. First, this finding concerns only a few of the thousands of cases studied. Transmission of Alzheimer’s disease by this means, rather than genetics, therefore appears to be extremely rare. In addition, growth hormone taken from cadaveric pituitary glands has been banned in France, as in the United Kingdom, since the late 1980s following the Creutzfeldt-Jakob scandal. But the understanding of the pathology, which is extremely close to prions, has just taken a big step forward.

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