British neurophysiologists found that injections of contaminated human growth hormone, used to stimulate the growth of children at the end of the last century, caused in three or four decades at least five cases of Alzheimer's disease. This is reported by the press service of University College London (UCL).

In 2015, British neurophysiologists discovered evidence that injections of poorly purified growth hormone of human origin can not only cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but also provoke the development of Alzheimer's disease. This discovery has generated a great deal of interest in how often and how dementia occurs in people who have received such injections.

Guided by these considerations, the researchers examined the medical histories of a large number of UK residents who had received one or more injections of crude human growth hormone between 1960 and 1980. In this analysis, the scientists were able to identify eight patients at a time who had received long-term injections of the hormone contaminated with beta-amyloid.

Beta-amyloid is a self-replicating toxic protein clump that promotes massive neuronal death in the development of Alzheimer's disease. Scientists found that ingestion of beta-amyloid along with growth hormone led to unusually rapid development of dementia in five out of eight patients who had received injections of the substance as children. Four of them developed dementia before the age of 50, and another patient developed dementia at the age of 55.

Subsequent analysis of their medical histories showed that virtually all but one of the patients were not genetically predisposed to the development of Alzheimer's disease, as well as did not suffer from various chronic and congenital developmental defects. According to the researchers, this, coupled with their previous experiments, argues in favor of the fact that dementia developed as a result of contaminated growth hormone injections and not for any other reason.

In favor of this, as noted by scientists, says as well that all five patients received the hormone produced by the same methodology, developed in 1948 by American endocrinologist Alfred Wilhelmi. After identifying the first cases of development of the disease Kreutzfeld-Jakoba in 1985, its use in medical practice stopped, which excludes the possibility of new similar cases of Alzheimer's disease, the researchers summarized.