A study into people who died of a separate kind of brain disease
after receiving injections of human growth hormone suggests that
Alzheimer’s may also be a transmissible disease.
The findings have raised questions about the safety of some
medical procedures, possibly including blood transfusions and
invasive dental treatment, which may involve the transfer of
contaminated tissues or surgical equipment.
The investigation has
shown for the first time in humans that Alzheimer’s disease
may be a transmissible
infection which could be inadvertently passed between people.
Scientists emphasised
that the new evidence is still preliminary and should not stop anyone
from having surgery. They have
also stressed that it is not possible to “catch” Alzheimer’s by
living with someone with the disease.
Which one is
it? You can't have it both ways.
However, the findings of a study into eight people who were given
growth hormone injections when they were children have raised the
disturbing possibility that Alzheimer’s can be transmitted under
certain circumstances when infected tissues or surgical instruments
are passed between individuals.
Until now, it was thought that Alzheimer’s occurred only as
a result of inheriting certain genetic mutations causing the familial
version of the disease, or from random “sporadic” events within
the brain of elderly people, said Professor John Collinge, head of
neurodegenerative diseases at University College London.
“What we need to consider is that in addition to there being
sporadic Alzheimer’s disease and inherited or familial Alzheimer’s
disease,
there could also be acquired
forms of Alzheimer’s disease,” Professor Collinge
said.
“
You could have three different ways
you have these protein seeds generated in your brain. Either they
happen spontaneously, an unlucky event as you age, or you have a
faulty gene, or you’ve been exposed to a medical accident. That’s
what we’re hypothesising,” he said.
“It’s important to emphasise that this relates to a very
special situation where people have been injected essentially with
extracts of human tissue. In no way are we suggesting that
Alzheimer’s is a contagious disease. You cannot catch Alzheimer’s
disease by living with or caring for someone with the disease,” he
added.
Again, one way
or the other. Dichotomies are not logical.
The eight adults, aged between 36 and 51, all died of
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) after receiving contaminated hormone
injections as children. But autopsies on their brains also revealed
that seven of them harboured the misfolded proteins associated with
the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It is unheard of for
people in this age group to have such proteins.
The scientists did not find the “tau” protein tangles
associated with the later stages of the disease, which means the
seven individuals did not have full-blown Alzheimer’s, although
they may well have developed it had they not died of CJD, Professor
Collinge said.
The study, published in the journal
Nature, eliminated
other possible reasons for the presence of these so-called
amyloid-beta (A-beta) proteins and came to the conclusion that they
were most probably transmitted as protein “seeds” in the
growth-hormone injections.
Questions remain about whether these
protein seeds could also be transmitted on surgical instruments used
in other operations. It is well-established that the prion proteins
behind CJD and Alzheimer’s stick to metal surfaces and can survive
extreme sterilisation procedures such as steam cleaning and
formaldehyde.
There is also the question of whether Alzheimer’s disease could
be passed on in blood transfusions, given that animal experiments
have shown this to be possible.
“It is
not clear here
that this is relevant to blood transfusions, and epidemiological
studies have been done in the past looking for links between
Alzheimer’s disease and blood transfusions and they have
not
shown an association,” Professor Collinge said.
Is the
grammatical error on purpose or accident?
“Certainly with vCJD, which is the form of CJD associated with
mad-cow disease, there is infectivity found in the blood and there
have been four documented cases in the UK of vCJD from a blood donor
who went on to get vCJD, so it can occur,” he said.
Speaking at a press conference, Professor Collinge added:
“
Certainly there are potential risks in
dentistry where it is impacting on nervous tissue, such as root-canal
treatments and special precautions are taken for that reason...
Ha! ...go see
dentist "Dr." Safwat B. Atta's, another piece-of-shit
hindu's, "special" precautions if you want a giggle. That
jackass already has spongiform encephalitis (explains a lot).
If you are speculating whether A-beta seeds are transmitted at
all by surgical instruments one would have to consider whether
certain types of dental procedures might be relevant.”
Dickwad's
"procedures"? Go see Hindu
Medical Show for more.
But in a statement issued later, Dr Collinge clarified
that
more research was needed before any conclusions could
be drawn about any potential risks in current medical or dental
treatments.
read: "more
money"
“Our findings relate to the specific circumstance of
cadaver-derived human growth hormone injections, a treatment that was
discontinued many years ago,” he said.
“It is possible our findings might be relevant to some other
medical or surgical procedures, but evaluating what risk, if any,
there might be requires much further research. Our current data has
no bearing on dental surgery and certainly does not argue that
dentistry poses a risk of Alzheimer’s disease.”
Dichotomy
again. The typical "know-nothing" squad.
Between 1958 and 1985 some 1,848 people in Britain, mostly
children, received growth hormone injections made from tens of
thousands of homogenised pituitary glands derived from the brains of
human cadavers.
The NHS switched to synthetic growth hormone in 1985 when
scientists realised that pituitary-derived hormone could be a route
for transmitting CJD. Up to 2000, there were 38 known cases of
“iatrogenic” CJD resulting from growth hormone injections in the
UK, but this figure is likely to rise further because of the
exceptionally long incubation period of the disease.
Of the seven patients who had the early signs of Alzheimer’s,
four had severe deposits of amyloid-beta protein, three had moderate
deposits and one had traces.
Dame Sally Davies, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer,
played down the significance of the research yesterday saying that it
was a small study on only eight samples.
“There is no evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can be
transmitted in humans, nor is there any evidence that Alzheimer’s
disease can be transmitted through any medical procedure,” Dame
Sally said.
“
I can reassure people that the NHS
has extremely stringent procedures in place to minimise infection
risk from surgical equipment, and patients are very well protected,”
she added.
...and Great
Britain has no hindu "doctors" of course. And, as you can
tell from the extensively researched Hindu
Medicine Show, one may
surmise that the good Dame has her head up her bum.
John Hardy, professor of Neuroscience at UCL, said: “I think we
can be relatively sure that it is possible to transmit amyloid
pathology by the injection of human tissues which contain the amyloid
of Alzheimer’s disease. Does it have implications for blood
transfusions? Probably not, but this definitely deserves systematic
epidemiological investigation.”
Doug Brown, director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society,
said: “While these findings are interesting and warrant further
investigation, there are too many unknowns in this small,
observational study of eight brains to draw any conclusions about
whether Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted this way.
“Injections of growth hormone taken from human brains were
stopped in the 1980s. There remains absolutely no evidence that
Alzheimer’s disease is contagious or can be transmitted from person
to person via any current medical procedures.”
IF then WHY?
...strange statement, methinks someone's snapping my jock.
Alzheimer’s disease is now considered a “prion disease”.
Prions, short for proteinaceous infectious particles, are misfolded
proteins that carry the ability to trigger further proteins to
misfold, leading to debilitating brain disorders, such as CJD in
humans, BSE in cattle and scrapie in sheep.
...and kuru in
cannibals...
Prions are unique in being an
infectious agent without any genes, unlike viruses or bacteria. They
are extremely tenacious, sticking to metal surfaces of surgical
instruments and surviving the high temperatures and chemical agents
that kill off infectious viruses and microbes.
Stanley Prusiner, of the University of California, coined the word
prion in the early 1980s and his pioneering work on them led to a
Nobel Prize in 1997.
IF Alzheimer's is a prion disease as it
appears to be, THEN it stands to reason that it is contagious and
requires exceptional sterilization techniques even for simple things
like routine endoscopies.
It is very well known, and
unfortunately, experienced (see Hindu
Medicine Show) how poorly, if at all, how trained
Indian "doctors" are, and even western techniques are
marginally up to coping with the prevention of prion diseases.
After being in a nursing home after a
major stroke, released after 19 months, "free at last!" for
four months, mugged and severely mangled by a trio of crack-heads,
major surgery to repair what the finest, most misunderstood, gentle
"people" did, developing pneumonia severe enough to be
hospitalized in a hindu-run hospital for 17 days, and dropping to 89
pounds, this issue naturally interests me. I've not recovered to near
the condition I was in before the crack-heads did their crack-head
thing (see The Bell Curve for
more) and I have taken the time to study the residue of people with
Alzheimer's, dementia, etc. 2 1/2 years of having such mental
stimulation with slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, droolers has been
soooo much fun I could just shit. ...and the crack-heads? Free. They
are a protected class unlike 5' 4", 120 pound, old, crippled,
broke, white men in wheelchairs.
2 1/2 years in the Drooling Academy.
I'll graduate soon.
the thousand yard stare has begun...
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