Alzheimer’s, but a contagious disease?

Currently, Alzheimer’s disease is considered a spontaneous or hereditary development.

But British researchers suggest it can also be transmitted between patients.

At least eight cases were later identified, presenting the first known cases of “human-to-human transmission”.

What if Alzheimer’s can also be transmitted from one patient to another? In any case, a new study suggests this is a neurodegenerative disease that was previously thought to develop only spontaneously or inherited, and which affects more than 35.6 million people worldwide. For about 900,000 people in France alone.

Published in this Monday, January 29 magazine Nature MedicineIt was conducted by researchers at University College London and concerns the cases of at least five patients diagnosed before 1985 after receiving growth hormone injections from donors suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Signs of cognitive decline and memory loss

To draw these conclusions, John Collinge’s research team analyzed medical data from 1,848 patients in the United Kingdom who received growth hormones between 1959 and 1985. In more detail, the substance he was given at that time was given to compensate for stunted growth in children. , comes from the pituitary gland, a small gland located at the base of the brain, of dead people.

However, according to studies, most of them have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), “Prion Disease” Malignant dementia occurs when certain groups of hormones contain beta-amyloid proteins, a signature of Alzheimer’s disease.

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Note that in addition to the five patients now aged 54 and 57, showing signs of cognitive decline and memory loss, three other patients were affected earlier (aged 47 and 57) by the disease. Alzheimer’s and has since died. In total, 4% of patients who received samples contaminated with one or the other of the two diseases died.

Worrying discovery?

If the discovery proves crucial in terms of public health, and can help improve patient care, it’s not a cause for concern, according to scientists. “The new type of Alzheimer’s disease reported here is of great scientific interest, because it shows a new way of spreading the disease, nothing to be afraid of, because the mode of transmission of this disease has been caught more than 40 years ago.”, especially underline with The Guardian Andrew Doig, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Manchester, in reference to the ban on medical intervention in question after the death mentioned earlier.

However, apart from this now restricted protocol, there is no other case “Human-to-Human Transmission” Not yet reported in the scientific literature. The researchers also emphasize the fact that their discovery certainly provides the first evidence of technically possible transmission between patients, but not necessarily that it is an infectious disease.