Alzheimer’s disease was passed to patients given hormones extracted from corpses, scientists have shown for the first time.
Five people are believed to have developed Alzheimer’s after they were treated with a human growth hormone which inadvertently contained the seeds of dementia.
The tainted hormone was given to more than 1,800 children of short stature in the UK between 1959 and 1995 before being withdrawn when it was shown to trigger Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).
