The story was one of the biggest medical scandals of the second half of the 20th century.
Twenty years ago, neurologists first reported that 80 out of an estimated 1,848 children treated with human growth hormone injections between 1959 and 1985 to prevent short stature,
went on to develop a rare but devastating form of dementia called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), later in life. CJD is driven by abnormally shaped proteins called prions which infect the brain before spreading rapidly, triggering other healthy proteins to change their shape and form toxic clumps, a process which results in progressive brain cell death.
Now, neurologists at the UCL Institute of Prion Diseases have
published a new study in Nature Medicine, suggesting that five more children treated with growth hormone injections later developed
early-onset Alzheimer’s between the ages of 38 and 55.
Peter Garrard, an honorary consultant neurologist at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, told
The Telegraph that he has treated one of these five patients.
“He presented with memory problems, and from a clinical point of view I didn’t have any hesitation in diagnosing him with Alzheimer’s disease,” says Garrard. “Over the three years since I first saw him, he has progressed in a relentless and unfortunate way, such that his cognitive deficits are no longer confined to memory. He
requires help with significant amounts of daily life.”
So how did this scandal happen?
A now-banned procedure
It sounds archaic by modern standards, but for much of the 20th century the only means of producing growth hormone was to remove the pituitary glands from the brains of deceased individuals who had donated their bodies to medicine.
These hormone-producing glands are located at the base of the brain and doctors would often have to collect glands from many different brain samples to collect sufficient growth hormone to perform a procedure. This was then injected into children in the hope that it would boost their growth rate, until the use of human-derived growth hormone was eventually banned in 1985 after health risks started to become apparent.
