There is a line of research into the "transmissible' phenomena of a lot of these neurodegen dz. Epidemiologically, it's probably not infectious from one person to another bc we don't see spouses getting PD or AD often. But there's interesting phenomena - i.e. one of the Parkinson's stem cell implantation trials got a lot of press after the trial (which failed, didn't show benefit) bc after subjects passed several years later and got autopsied, they found clumps of parkinsonian proteins (lewy bodies) on the histology slides of the implanted stem cells.
Similarly, there's some papers w/ mice w/ knockout Parkinsonian genes getting parkinsonian features and lewy bodies when injected w/ abnormal misfolded synuclein from another mouse.
What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.
Actually it may seem so [1], though still there is not any conclusive evidence to support a transmission hypothesis really as all this could be due to increased stress and such factors. Also, brain surgeons' increased risk of AD and more reports of associated risks with regard to contamination from brain operations [2] (similar to the article's ones) provide more indications that such a hypothesis is not completely implausible. Though also far from strongly supporting it or anything, as there is no proper experiment design with control groups etc to make better conclusions.
Yes there may be these individual case reports - but in practice - I would say, most spouses of PD patients don't seem to get it. There's like 2 exceptions out of 1000 patients in our clinic, but not enough that I feel like running to my epidemiologist with my hair on fire.
> What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.
Sounds like a sensible next step would be to try and replicate this in animal models (i.e. treat animals with growth hormones extracted from cadavers of same species) to identify the proteins/prions that trigger the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's, which could perhaps be drug targets for at least a subset of AD causes.
I've heard rumblings re preclinical prep work w/ the Takashi group at Kyoto University as well, not sure where that's at at the moment.
I randomly found this review, but haven't had a chance to plough thru it yet, but I wouldn't be surprised that the stem cell tech these days makes whatever they used 20 years ago ancient and crude by comparison https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9890289/
Additionally, this was the followup paper that found Lewy bodies developing in the transplanted cells (suggesting some sort of spread/prion-like hypothesis with regards to Lewy bodies/insoluble alpha synuclein)
This comment is full of abbreviations (PD = Parkinson's Disease, AD = Alzheimer's Disease) that makes it a bit difficult to read (if you don't know / realize what those abbreviations stand for)
it's an exceptionally common way of writing with and without. similar to "etc." standing for "et cetera." at some point you don't "decode" it, thats just what it means.
Similarly, there's some papers w/ mice w/ knockout Parkinsonian genes getting parkinsonian features and lewy bodies when injected w/ abnormal misfolded synuclein from another mouse.
What exactly to do w/ this, no one is entirely sure yet.