A leading Alzheimer’s disease researcher wants Australian recipients of human growth hormone procedures in the 1970s to undergo diagnostic testing for Alzheimer’s disease following recent confirmation of a link in UK patients.
Professor Colin Masters and colleague Professor Steve Collins, who lead the Australian National Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Registry at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne, warn the findings could pose a serious public health issue, with more than 2000 Australians potentially at risk.
The study published in Nature Medicine [link here] identified eight likely cases of young onset of Alzheimer’s disease from 1,848 recipients of cadaver-derived pituitary growth hormone (c-hGH) in the UK National Prion Monitoring Cohort.
The procedure has already been attributed to the cause of 80 cases of iatrogenic or medically-derived Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in the UK group.
The study authors said five of the eight c-hGH recipients were referred to the National Prion Clinic with symptoms consistent with early-onset dementia, with progressive cognitive impairment in two or more domains severe enough to affect the performance of daily activities and in some cases, progression was rapid.
Of the eight patients, an Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis had been made before clinic referral in three patients and two patients met diagnostic criteria for probable disease. While the remaining three patients either had mild cognitive impairment symptoms, had subjective cognitive symptoms or were asymptomatic.
The latency from c-hGH exposure to symptoms was three to four decades, and the ages of symptom onset ranged from 38-55 years old.
“The c-hGH recipients that we report here have developed new and progressive disturbances of cognition that meet standard definitions for dementia (five cases) or mild cognitive impairment (one case); they also show changes consistent with Alzheimer’s disease (definite in four cases; suggestive in two patients with a clinical diagnosis of dementia),” wrote the authors.