Medical Design and Outsourcing

  • Home
  • Medical Device Business
    • Mergers & Acquisitions
    • Financial
    • Regulatory
  • Applications
    • Cardiovascular
    • Devices
    • Imaging
    • Implantables
    • Medical Equipment
    • Orthopedic
    • Surgical
  • Technologies
    • Contract Manufacturing
    • Components
    • Electronics
    • Extrusions
    • Materials
    • Motion Control
    • Prototyping
    • Pumps
    • Tubing
  • Med Tech Resources
    • DeviceTalks Tuesdays
    • Digital Editions
    • eBooks
    • Manufacturer Search
    • Medical Device Handbook
    • MedTech 100 Index
    • Podcasts
    • Print Subscription
    • The Big 100
    • Webinars / Digital Events
    • Whitepapers
    • Video
  • 2022 Leadership in MedTech
    • 2022 Leadership Voting!
    • 2021 Winners
    • 2020 Winners
  • Women in Medtech

Study Finds Incidents Of Amyloid Protein Transmission Through Neurosurgery

February 21, 2018 By University College London

Amyloid beta pathology — protein deposits in the brain — might have been transmitted by contaminated neurosurgical instruments, suggests a new study.

For the paper, published 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,” says the study’s lead author, Professor Sebastian Brandner of the University College London 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. These deposits of the amyloid protein occur increasingly frequently in older individuals but only very rarely in younger people.

Four cases were identified — three of them were in their 30s, and one was aged 57 — all of whom had experienced brain bleeds caused by amyloid deposits in brain blood vessels. None had any known genetic causes that predispose to this pathology in younger people.

A separate review of the medical literature supported the discovery by identifying four other case studies with similar pathology and past surgical history. As these patients were all men with a history of head trauma, research teams had previously speculated that those were correlated.

The new study suggests otherwise, as all patients had a history of childhood neurosurgery, three were women and only one had a history of head trauma.

In a comparison group of 50 people of similar ages from the same archives, the researchers did not find any amyloid beta pathology and only three had a recorded history of childhood neurosurgery.

Previous work in laboratory animals has shown that tiny amounts of abnormal amyloid beta protein can stick to steel wires and transmit pathology into the animals’ brains, but this paper is the first to suggest the same may be possible in humans.

The new study follows reports in recent years of amyloid beta pathology in brain blood vessels following treatment with cadaver-derived human growth hormone in childhood.

“We have found new evidence that amyloid beta pathology may be transmissible. This does not mean that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted, as we did not find any significant amount of pathological tau protein which is the other hallmark protein of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Brandner.

“Our findings relate to neurosurgical procedures done a long time ago. Nevertheless, the possibility of pathological protein transmission, while rare, should factor into reviews of sterilisation and safety practices for surgical procedures,” he adds.

“Neurosurgery is becoming increasingly common in older individuals. As amyloid beta pathology increases in brains with age, this raises the potential for onward transmission of protein pathology to other individuals in the same hospital,” says the study’s first author, Dr. Zane Jaunmuktane, of the UCL Institute of Neurology.

As this study was small and retrospective, the authors hope their findings stimulate others to explore these ideas further. They are currently expanding their study by looking at more archives across the U.K.

“There are several reasonable alternative explanations for our findings that we cannot yet rule out. Further research is required to clarify things. A large epidemiological study would be particularly useful,” says co-author Professor Simon Mead, of the MRC Prion Unit at UCL.

Related Articles Read More >

Lazurite ArthroFree wireless surgical camera system Minnetronix Medical
How Minnetronix Medical helped Lazurite with its wireless surgical camera
Medtronic Hugo robot-assisted surgery system
The road to a robot: Medtronic’s development process for its Hugo RAS system
A portrait of Stryker executive Siddarth Satish
How Stryker includes users for product design in the digital age
A portrait of Stryker executive Tracy Robertson
Stryker leaders talk medtech trends at DeviceTalks Boston: ‘If you’re slow, you’re going to lose’

DeviceTalks Weekly.

May 13, 2022
Our Pre-Post-DeviceTalks Boston episode, also MedtronicTalks replay with Gastro CMO Austin Chiang
See More >

MDO Digital Edition

Digital Edition

Subscribe to Medical Design & Outsourcing. Bookmark, share and interact with the leading medical design engineering magazine today.

MEDTECH 100 INDEX

Medtech 100 logo
Market Summary > Current Price
The MedTech 100 is a financial index calculated using the BIG100 companies covered in Medical Design and Outsourcing.
DeviceTalks

DeviceTalks is a conversation among medical technology leaders. It's events, podcasts, webinars and one-on-one exchanges of ideas & insights.

DeviceTalks

New MedTech Resource

Medical Tubing

Enewsletter Subscriptions

Enewsletter Subscriptions

MassDevice

Mass Device

The Medical Device Business Journal. MassDevice is the leading medical device news business journal telling the stories of the devices that save lives.

Visit Website
MDO ad
Medical Design and Outsourcing
  • MassDevice
  • DeviceTalks
  • MedTech 100 Index
  • Medical Tubing + Extrusion
  • Drug Delivery Business News
  • Drug Discovery & Development
  • Pharmaceutical Processing World
  • R&D World
  • About Us/Contact
  • Advertise With Us
  • Subscribe to Print Magazine
  • Subscribe to E-newsletter
  • Attend our Monthly Webinars
  • Listen to our Weekly Podcasts
  • Join our DeviceTalks Tuesdays Discussion

Copyright © 2022 WTWH Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Site Map | Privacy Policy | RSS

Search Medical Design & Outsourcing

  • Home
  • Medical Device Business
    • Mergers & Acquisitions
    • Financial
    • Regulatory
  • Applications
    • Cardiovascular
    • Devices
    • Imaging
    • Implantables
    • Medical Equipment
    • Orthopedic
    • Surgical
  • Technologies
    • Contract Manufacturing
    • Components
    • Electronics
    • Extrusions
    • Materials
    • Motion Control
    • Prototyping
    • Pumps
    • Tubing
  • Med Tech Resources
    • DeviceTalks Tuesdays
    • Digital Editions
    • eBooks
    • Manufacturer Search
    • Medical Device Handbook
    • MedTech 100 Index
    • Podcasts
    • Print Subscription
    • The Big 100
    • Webinars / Digital Events
    • Whitepapers
    • Video
  • 2022 Leadership in MedTech
    • 2022 Leadership Voting!
    • 2021 Winners
    • 2020 Winners
  • Women in Medtech