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Children's hormone treatments may have planted the seeds for later Alzheimer's disease, according to a small, new observational study.

The study is based on the autopsies of eight people who died from the rare neurodegenerative disorder called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), which is caused by a prion, a type of misfolded protein. The eight patients were among hundreds of people inadvertently infected with the prion as children, between 1958 and 1985, when they received human growth hormone treatments intended to treat their short stature. These treatments were later realized to be contaminated with the prion.

Scientists found that four of the eight brains harbored extensive deposits of a protein called amyloid beta, which is the main component of amyloid plaque, the telltale characteristic of Alzheimer's disease.

Two more of the brains had patchy yet significant amounts of amyloid beta, and only one brain was completely free of the protein. Amyloid beta is not typically found in the brains of CJD patients