An NIH panel will convene an emergency meeting amid concerns that thousands of Americans could be at risk of contracting Alzheimer's disease.
An explosive British study published on Monday found evidence that at least five people “infected” the memory-robbing disorder from a now-banned hormone treatment.
The growth hormones extracted from the bodies of dead people were laced with toxic amyloid beta protein “seeds,” or prions, which have been shown to cause early-onset dementia.
Health experts in the US – where nearly 8,000 children were injected with the therapy between the 1960s and 1980s – now fear cases on this side of the Atlantic may have gone undetected.
A spokeswoman for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told : “In light of this new information, the committee will meet to discuss the issue and re-analyze the data for possible links to Alzheimer's or dementia-related diseases.”
US prepares to reanalyze data to detect cases where patients developed early-onset dementia after receiving dangerous human growth hormone vaccinations (stock image)
understands that the meeting will take place in early February at the Public Health Service's Interagency Coordinating Committee on Human Growth Hormone and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
Plans were drawn up in the hours after the British study was published.
The panel will re-examine the U.S. data for signs that patients given growth hormone injections developed Alzheimer's disease.
Minutes from previous meetings show that the committee has suspected that at least one American in his 60s died of Alzheimer's disease after receiving the vaccine as a child.
If a link is found, it could potentially open the door to possible lawsuits.
In the United Kingdom, where 1,800 children received the shots, the government previously agreed to pay up to $380,000 (£300,000) to people who suffered mental illness as a result of the shots.
The vaccines were given to unusually young children, aged four, between 1959 and 1985.
They contained human growth hormone (HGH), extracted from the pituitary glands of corpses, to stimulate their growth.
The technique was then banned and doctors used synthetic hormones instead after some batches were found to be contaminated with prions, which led to a fatal and incurable brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). CJD itself is closely linked to mad cow disease.
Scientists now believe that other medical and surgical procedures could pose a risk of spreading Alzheimer's because prions – which accumulate in the brain and kill neurons – can survive hospital sterilization methods.
As prions accumulate in the brain, plaque buildup can occur in the brain. Abnormal protein buildups in and around neurons are believed to be the cause of Alzheimer's disease.
Experts insist the disease cannot be transmitted from person to person in the traditional sense, such as Covid.
Five of the 1,848 patients injected with growth hormone were infected with toxic amyloid beta protein “seeds” as children. All five suffered from the same rare, early-onset form of the devastating dementia. Others who received the same treatment are now considered “at risk.”
Of the 1,800 people in the UK vaccinated by 1985, at least 80 developed CJD, while at least five suffered from early-stage Alzheimer's.
In the United States, 35 cases of CJD were detected among the 7,700 patients who received the faulty vaccinations.
Experts say this was due to a change in how the vaccines were made in 1977 that led to improved purification technology that weeded out dangerous proteins.
In the US, the shots were administered for research purposes by the National Hormone and Pituitary Program (NHPP), funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Doctors stopped using the hormone in 1985 when scientists discovered three cases of CJD in young men who had received the shots – and a connection was suspected.
People currently receiving human growth hormone are not at risk of complications because the hormone is now produced by genetically modified bacteria in the laboratory, eliminating the risk of contamination with dangerous proteins.
The NIH spokeswoman added: “No data from the [US cohort] have suggested a link between human growth hormone from cadavers and Alzheimer’s disease.”
It was previously thought that there were two forms of Alzheimer's: a “sporadic” variant that affects thousands of people over 65 and is by far the most common, and a genetic, early-onset form that runs in families.
But the team at University College London in the United Kingdom that conducted the British study says it has now identified a third variant that is slightly different from the others and is very rare and can be passed from one person to another.
UCL scientists were allowed to test batches of the infected growth hormone that had been stored as a dried powder for decades.
They tested the decades-old powder on mice and found that it triggered the production of Alzheimer's-causing proteins.