2024-01-30 00:50:00
Growth hormone treatmentⓒ News1 DB
A new study has found that people who were treated with human growth hormone decades ago developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that there may be a link between the two. Amyloid beta protein, a toxic substance that causes dementia, can be transmitted through growth hormone, and this is the only case of Alzheimer’s transmission between humans.
According to CNN in the U.S., a British study published in the medical journal ‘Nager Medicine’ on the 29th (local time) found that patients with growth hormone deficiency had a history of receiving pituitary growth hormone extracted and prepared in a specific way from cadavers. Eight adults were surveyed, and five of them developed Alzheimer’s in their 40s and 50s. The remaining three died at the ages of 57, 54, and 47. In the past, growth hormones were made by extracting them from corpses, but now they are made using genetic recombination technology.
The study, involving specialists from the Prion Disease Institute at University College London and neurologists and neurosurgeons at the British National Hospital, said the patients were among 1,848 people treated with human growth hormone derived from cadaveric pituitary glands in the UK between 1959 and 1985. It was. At the time, this treatment was also used in other parts of the world, including the United States. The treatment was discontinued after cases of a rare brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (mad cow disease) were linked to administration of human growth hormone contaminated with cadavers.
Researchers began their study with the premise that Alzheimer’s disease could be transmitted if exposed over several years to human hormones contaminated with prions, the causative agent of mad cow disease, and amyloid beta, the causative agent of Alzheimer’s disease. Although prions are not the causative agents of Alzheimer’s, separate studies have shown that they have similar behavioral characteristics to the dementia causative agents (amyloid beta and tau).
“We now provide evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can also be transmitted under certain circumstances,” the researchers wrote. They did not believe that amyloid beta could be transmitted from person to person through everyday activities or through modern, routine medical care. However, he recommended that “medical procedures should be reviewed to ensure that cases of Alzheimer’s disease do not occur in the future.”
(Seoul = News 1)
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