Five cases serve to identify a possible route of transmission of Alzheimer's disease. A team of British researchers describes in the latest issue of the journal 'Nature Medicine' the case of five people who developed a similar dementia.
The five people received treatment with growth hormone extracted from the pituitary glands of cadavers. This procedure was stopped more than 40 years ago, after it was found that it allowed the transmission of prions that cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Nowadays, the growth hormone used in different therapies is obtained synthetically.