One of the most poignant health crises of the end of the 20th centurye century – that of growth hormone, having had children and adolescents as its first victims – resurfaces with the publication of a British study in the journal Nature Medicine, Monday January 23. The team of John Collinge (Institute of Prion Diseases, University College, London) describes five patients who received growth hormone injections before 1985, who were recently diagnosed with atypical Alzheimer’s disease which seems to have origin of this treatment.
Intended to compensate for height deficits, the hormone administered to them was extracted from pituitary glands taken from deceased humans, some of whom were carriers of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). If they escaped this incurable neurodegenerative disease, which has caused the death to date of more than 4% of the approximately 1,849 young British patients who were treated in this way between 1959 and 1985, five of the eight patients described in Nature Medicine were affected early by Alzheimer’s disease: three died between the ages of 47 and 57. The other five are currently between 54 and 57 years old. Among them, two have signs of cognitive decline without a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s having been made, and the last is asymptomatic.
This observation suggests, according to British researchers, that like incurable prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Alzheimer’s disease can in certain circumstances take a transmissible form, in addition to its sporadic or linked appearances. to genetic predispositions.
Deadly Aggregates
According to them, this discovery has implications in terms of public health and prevention – “for example, by ensuring effective decontamination of surgical instruments”, they write. There is however “no proof” that the amyloid beta protein (Aß), whose accumulation in the form of plaques in the central nervous system is a signature of Alzheimer’s disease, can be transmitted in contexts other than this one, such as “in daily life, or during the administration of routine care”they reassure.
Prion diseases result from the misfolding of a protein whose new conformation propagates by domino effect to those close to it, to the point of forming 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 – agents referred to as ” prion-like » (“prion-like”). The study by John Collinge and his colleagues reinforces the links that a growing body of work is establishing between these two groups of diseases.
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