It mentions brain proteins contaminating it, makes me think of prions.
> The far wider relevance of prion mechanisms was first exemplified with the discovery of yeast prions but has also widened considerably with the recognition that the more common human neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, involve accumulation and spread of assemblies of misfolded host proteins in what is often described as a ‘prion-like’ fashion with experimental transmission of relevant pathology in primates or mouse models. However, the importance for human disease was unclear until the recognition of human transmission of amyloid-beta (Aβ) pathology via iatrogenic routes after prolonged incubation periods, causing iatrogenic cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and raising the possibility that iatrogenic Alzheimer’s disease may occur at even longer latency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_prion_protein
Demonstrating "some other other protein behaving like a prion" is close to nobel prize territory.
Do people who undergo spinal, brain, retinal surgery have a higher incidence of Alzheimer when compared with the rest of the population?
Otherwise there is no point in chasing this "some other other protein behaving like a prion" avenue.
In that case scarring/inflammation might trigger the Alzheimer's though. The interesting part in this article is that the growth hormone was not injected into brain tissue I assume.
ie. some protein other than PrP gets misfolded and then acts as a template to cause more misfolding. I've read up a bit on ALS as my sister has it and while it's not fully understood the most likely cause seems misfolding of a proteins called or TDP-43 or SOD1. Eg from a paper:
>recent cultured cell line and animal model studies suggest that the misfolded forms of SOD1 and TDP-43 do self-propagate within neuronal cells and transmit to neighboring cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363329/
>All known mammalian prion diseases were caused by PrP until 2015, when a prion form of alpha-synuclein was hypothesized to cause multiple system atrophy (MSA).[10]
The moral of the story seems to be, don't eat brains.
I no longer eat meat, but when I was younger I considered the brains as the tastiest part of an animal, when properly prepared and cooked.
It is said that in USA eating organs is not very popular, so it is likely that many have never experienced well cooked brains, to know what they are missing.
There exists a hypothesis that is rather plausible, that breaking bones and eating their content of brains and marrow has played an important role in the evolution of humans, by providing an abundant source of long-chain fatty acids, enabling the unusual mass ratio between the central nervous system and the whole body that characterizes humans.
If you do not have risk factors for heart disease, you should limit your cholesterol intake to no more than 300 milligrams a day.
1000% your rda of cholesterol in a single serving!
If is a prion, it should resist most sterilization of dental instruments by heat on autoclave. So is obvious IMAO that this could be a way to spread the disease from one patient to other, but I'm not an expert on clinic procedures and the protocols may have been updated. This is known, or at least suspected, since maybe a decade or so.
Herpes?
1. Travels along nerve cells
2. Causes lifelong infection
3. Can enter the brain (HSV encephalitis)
4. Herpetic whitlow used to be an occupational disease of dental workers (still is to some extent)
"Overwhelming Evidence for a Major Role for Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1 (HSV1) in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD); Underwhelming Evidence against"
Dentists are a special group that worked a lot with mercury in the past, dunno if is related but it could be a combination of risk factors. We should ask a chemist.
In any case today the facts can be very different.