The first alleged cases of Alzheimer's transmission described. Five people under the age of 55 suffer from dementia after receiving growth hormones obtained from cadavers.

Researchers emphasize that the disease is not contagious . It was an inadvertent experiment with tragic results. Thousands of short people around the world received growth hormones extracted from the pituitary glands of cadaver. The treatment was stopped around 1985, when it was discovered that these intramuscular injections could transmit the prions that cause the lethal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.