Alzheimer’s report ‘undermined’

A SENIOR government adviser attempted to discredit a controversial study which suggested that Alzheimer’s might be infectious before it was published.

Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer at the Department of Health, approached the editor of scientific journal, The Lancet, to undermine the study, according to The Independent.

Dame Sally is said to have told Richard Horton, the editor of The

Lancet, that the study on Alzheimer’s was likely to result in a public scare and asked for advice on handling the media reaction before it was published.

The study, published earlier this month, suggested that the “seeds” of Alzheimer’s disease may be transmitted from one person to another during certain medical procedures. It was based on the brain autopsies of eight people who had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) after receiving injections of human growth hormone from the pituitary glands of dead people.

The Independent claims that Dame Sally contacted Dr Horton on the weekend before Nature was to publish the study, having received confidential in- formation under strict embargo terms. In an unsigned editorial in The

Lancet this week, Dr Horton writes that an unnamed government source informed him of the study’s impending publication.

Dr Horton then wrote to the Science Media Centre in London, which funded the work by Professor John Collinge, a world authority on transmissible brain diseases.

A spokesman for the Department of Health refused to comment and said the identity of The Lancet’s source is the subject of a Freedom Of Information request.