Worried you could catch Alzheimer’s from a loved one? Read on THE MIND DOCTOR
After study finds it can pass between humans...
ADIAGNOSIS of Alzheimer’s brings upset, stress and worry. All too often, I have seen the fear in the eyes of patients when the news is delivered and, in an instant, the placid old age they once imagined is ripped from them. But it is enormously difficult for their family, too. Roles are suddenly changed: beloved spouses become full-time carers, while adult children foresee a future of worry for a parent who might even forget their names.
How much more terrifying would it be if they thought they could ‘catch’ Alzheimer’s from their loved one?
Caring for a patient with dementia is hard enough. Add to that the extraordinary notion that they might be contagious, and the job so selflessly taken on by thousands of husbands, wives and other family members across the country, often elderly themselves, becomes nightmarish.
It conjures a terrible vision of Alzheimer’s patients under permanent lockdown, shunned and isolated even by their loved ones. And yet the idea that this most loathed and feared disease could spread between people is exactly what headlines seemed to suggest last week.
REPORTS of research at University College London, which showed a small group of patients had ‘caught’ Alzheimer’s disease, caused alarm.
Understandably panicked at the thought that they might be able to contract it from their loved one, or might even have done so already, several carers asked me what I knew about it.
What I told them is what I’ll tell you, and I’ll be clear — and hopefully reassuring — from the outset. The cases discussed in the study are dreadfully sad, but we can categorically say that it is not possible to ‘catch’ Alzheimer’s disease from caring for someone with the condition.
So what did the study actually show? The research was conducted by neurologists at UCL’s Institute of Prion Diseases and published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine.
It involved a handful of patients who had been given human growth hormone many years ago, when it was extracted from the pituitary glands in the brains of people who had donated their body to medical science.
Its purpose was to help children of short stature grow. Yet, tragically, more than 20 years ago, scientists discovered that 80 out of an estimated 1,848 children who received the jabs between 1959 and 1985 had gone on to develop a rare form of dementia which is known as Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease (CJD). This is caused by a type of protein called a prion — the same protein that is involved in BSE (mad cow disease).
These proteins attach to proteins on the brain and cause them to change shape, resulting in brain cell death. Victims develop progressive problems with memory, thinking, movement and speech.
Two decades ago, it became apparent from studies that some of the brain tissue from cadavers that had been used to make the growth hormone had been infected with prions. These had been transferred to the poor children who had been injected, leading them to develop CJD. It was an awful medical scandal where doctors who had tried to help inadvertently did harm to 80 youngsters whose lives were cut short. But it has now been consigned to the history books. We no longer use growth hormone from dead bodies — it was banned in 1985 — and instead use a synthetic form. And now comes this new study describing five poor souls who received growth hormone from a cadaver but developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease rather than CJD. This puzzled researchers because Alzheimer’s isn’t caused by prions. Exactly what does cause it is still hotly debated, but we do know two proteins are involved. One of these is called amyloid-beta, which forms plaques around brain cells, and the other is called tau, which forms tangles within brain cells. Incredibly, to try to understand what was happening, the researchers managed to track down the original growth hormone samples that were used in the five patients, as they were still stored. When they were analysed, they found that rather than being contaminated with prions, they contained amyloidbeta proteins. The suggestion is that these behaved like a prion and somehow triggered more amyloid-beta to form, resulting in the patients developing Alzheimer’s.
WHY have I gone into such detail? Because I wanted to show how specific the circumstances were and therefore how impossible it is to ‘catch’ Alzheimer’s in normal life today.
It’s a shame so many people were stressed by the headlines, but the study itself might well help us understand more about Alzheimer’s, and anything that opens a window into its stillmysterious origins is valuable.
Dementia is an umbrella term for any condition that affects memory and thinking, and Alzheimer’s is the most common form, responsible for six in ten cases. Yet, despite it being so common and affecting so many people, we still don’t fully understand how it develops.
Far from heralding a dystopian future in which we all avoid Alzheimer’s sufferers for fear of getting the disease ourselves, this study could help scientists come up with a treatment.
If you have a loved one with the condition, don’t stop visiting or caring. There is nothing at all to fear.
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