HGH Linked to "Brain Eater"

HGH News from AP and Reuters

By Kristen Philipkoski
2004-04-09 16:25:00.0

A type of human growth hormone used mostly in the 1970s has caused 26 cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, the brain-wasting illness associated with mad-cow disease, according to new study results from the National Institutes of Health.

Before 1980, scientists typically took human growth hormone, or HGH, from the pituitary glands of cadavers to treat children with stunted growth. If those cadavers happened to have died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, the illness was passed on to the HGH recipients. About 7,700 patients in the United States received HGH from cadavers.

Now, scientists use only synthetic human growth hormone made using recombinant DNA technology. But because the incubation period for the disease can be as long as 30 years, cases of CJD have emerged slowly, and researchers say there could be more.

The good news, said James Mills, head of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and lead researcher on the NIH study, is that they found no cases of CJD in patients who took human growth hormone after 1977, when scientists began using an improved purification method.

"We don't know for sure because the incubation period is so long, so it will be many years before we rule it out," Mills said, "but we're encouraged that the later type of growth hormone as yet hasn't caused any cases."

In April 1985, doctors reported that three young people contracted CJD, which was not only extremely rare, but almost always occurred in elderly individuals. When researchers noticed all three had been treated with HGH, the use of growth hormone taken from cadavers stopped, and the NIH launched the study.

Scattered cases were reported in the past, but this is the first complete large study on patients who received old-fashioned HGH.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob is caused by malformed proteins in the brain called prions that cause other proteins nearby to also misfold. The odd shape of prions pokes holes in the brain.

Humans who eat meat from cows infected with mad-cow disease can get variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The disease has killed 153 people, almost all in Britain, since it was discovered in 1995. The mad-cow epidemic (during which 36 million cows were infected) struck the United Kingdom in the late 1980s, but the first cases of CJD didn't emerge until the mid-1990s.

Members of a New Guinea tribe of cannibals have been infected with another version of the disease, called kuru. Yet another type of prion disease -- known as sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease -- seems to emerge in people whether they've eaten infected meat or not. It's always fatal and strikes about 200 Americans every year.

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