By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
Source science
Alzheimer’s disease can spread via brain tissue from one person to another, according to a new study of several people in the United Kingdom who, as children, were prescribed a now-abandoned hormone therapy treatment. All received years of injections of human growth hormone extracted from pituitary glands in the brains of cadavers. The approach was halted in the mid-1980s after alarming evidence that it could transmit another fatal brain disease.