A research team is concerned that sticky proteins found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease could be spread to others by surgical instruments, even after they have been sterilized with formaldehyde.
Researchers in the UK looked at the brains of eight patients who died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) after being injected with pituitary growth hormone from cadavers years earlier, The Guardian reports. Six of those brains had an unusually high buildup of amyloid beta, the protein linked to Alzheimer's. The patients were between the ages of 36 to 51, and none had the gene variants that bring about early onset dementia. The findings could suggest that the seeds of amyloid beta were spread to the patients along with the abnormal proteins that gave them CJD.
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