Under very rare conditions, Alzheimer’s disease may be transmitted

Five patients who got tainted growth hormone injections developed early Alzheimer’s decades later

An image of a brain scan with glowing purple and orange spots that mark amyloid-beta.

A PET scan of the brain of a man who received contaminated growth hormones as a child and later developed Alzheimer’s disease shows higher-than-usual levels of the sticky protein A-beta (purple and orange areas) associated with the disease.

G. Banerjee et al/Nature Medicine 2024

Under extremely rare circumstances, it appears that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted between people.