A new study out of Europe is supporting the theory that some medical procedures can transmit the "seeds" of Alzheimer's disease from person to person.  Specifically, these are surgical procedures that involve the use of donated human tissue that doctors didn't know was tinged by a certain protein that is associated with Alzheimer's.

Researchers from the University Hospital Zurich and the Medical University of Vienna looked at the brains of seven patients aged 28 to 63 years old who had died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), known as the human version of Mad Cow Disease.  They found the presence of a protein called Amyloid Beta (A-beta) which is observed during the early stages of Alzheimer's.  It's unusual to see A-beta in patients that young, but there was a common thread:  Decades earlier, these people had received grafts of nerve tissue from cadavers, a practice that was halted in the 1980s.

"The growing circumstantial evidence for such transmission should prompt a critical re-evaluation of the decontamination procedure for surgical instruments and drugs of biological origin, with the goal to ensure the complete absence of potentially transmissible contaminants," said Dr. Herbert Budka of the Institute of Neuropathology in Zurich.

The study confirms the results of an earlier British study on Human Growth Hormone developed from cadavers, published in September.  It suggested that that people who had been injected with HGH as children were inadvertently given the same A-beta "seeds" of Alzheimer's disease.

"The fact that this is a completely different situation that is nothing to do with growth hormone or growth deficiency, but in people who had to have a surgical procedure and we are seeing the same thing is consistent with our hypothesis that this represents transmission of A-beta seeds to these individuals," said Professor John Collinge, head of neurodegenerative diseases at University College London.