Amyloid protein transmission through neurosurgery

Amyloid beta pathology - protein deposits in the brain - might have been transmitted by contaminated neurosurgical instruments, suggests a new UCL-led study. For the paper, published today in Acta Neuropathologica , researchers studied the medical records of four people who had brain bleeds caused by amyloid beta build-up in the blood vessels of the brain. They found that all four people had undergone neurosurgery two or three decades earlier as children or teenagers, raising the possibility that amyloid beta deposition may be transmissible through neurosurgical instruments in a similar way to prion proteins which are implicated in prion dementias such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Amyloid beta is best known for being one of the hallmark proteins of Alzheimer's disease, but the researchers did not find evidence of Alzheimer's in this study. "It is well known that the abnormal proteins seen in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease have been transmitted between patients by certain medical and surgical procedures. We have been investigating whether the same can be true for amyloid beta," said the study's lead author, Professor Sebastian Brandner (UCL Institute of Neurology). The researchers looked in the pathology archive at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery for biopsy and autopsy materials of young adult patients with confirmed amyloid beta pathology, which can lead to brain bleeds or harmful plaques, in the brain's blood vessels.