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Alzheimer's disease may be transmissible in humans, due to an infectious protein that could potentially be spread during medical surgery and blood transfusions.
Neuroscientists from University College London (UCL) carried out autopsies on the brains of eight people who died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD): a rare but typically fatal degenerative brain disease.
All the patients had contracted CJD after being treated with contaminated human growth-hormone (hGH). This procedure was later found to have transmitted "prions": proteins that exist normally in the human body but can trigger disease when they malfunction and "misfold".
In the study, published in Naturehttps://www.nature.com/articles/nature15369, the researchers found that six of the brains also harboured the "amyloid beta" protein, suspected to be the cause of Alzheimer's disease, the degenerative neurological disorder more commonly found in the elderly. In contrast, the patients studied all died between the ages of 36 and 51 -- and had no genetic predisposition to the disease.
Initially, the scientists thought that other prion diseases such as "Mad Cow Disease" (BSE) could be responsible for the high levels of amyloid beta. But after studying 116 other patients with other forms of prion disease, they found this wasn't the case -- meaning the transmissible prions themselves could likely be to blame.
Molecular neuroscientist John Hardy, one of the study's authors, said: "This is the first evidence of real-world transmission of amyloid pathology. It is potentially concerning."
However, despite these concerns, the scientists have noted that there's still no firm evidence for how prions and amyloid beta are linked. Furthermore, the small sample size of eight people rules out any definitive conclusions.
The researchers hope that future investigations into how clumps of prions could potentially be transmitted could help to advance research into Alzheimer's and other degenerative brain diseases.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
