The Case for Transmissible Alzheimer’s Grows

This was all the more disturbing in light of a study I had also recently written about that suggested that peptide aggregates – essentially sticky, self-propagating clumps of misfolded protein bits collectively referred to as amyloid — found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients may be transmissible in the same ways that prions are. In the original Alzheimer’s transmissibility study, scientists examined the brains of eight patients treated with prion-contaminated human growth hormone as children who decades later died from prion disease (out of over 30,000 people so treated, more than 200 died this way). They tested the samples for both Aβ peptides and tau, another protein that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and causes its other brain pathology: tangles.

Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com