Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted between people in rare circumstances as a result of medical procedures. This discovery comes following an investigation of unusually young Alzheimer’s patients in the UK who had all received growth hormones as children.
The hormones came from the pituitary glands of deceased individuals, a procedure banned in 1985 after it was linked to the transmission of misfolded proteins – prions – that cause Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD).