Fertility shots and the risk of prion disease

Women who are injected with hormones, like gonadotropins, which are urine-derived should be aware of a possible risk of developing prion disease - better recognized as mad cow disease. This is according to a new study by an international research team from Canada, France and the United States.

For the first time research shows the presence of prion protein in urinary-derived fertility products. Prion protein is naturally found in the human body in a harmless form, but it is the major component of infectious prion sin an aggregated misfolded form. Prions are the infectious agents responsible for such transmissible and fatal neurodegenerative diseases as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease, in cattle.

More than 300,000 women in North America are prescribed gonadotropins, the fertility hormones used to encourage fertility. Many of these are urine derived. The study is quick to point out that while it is possible that a woman might get BSE from the fertility drug, no case has ever been reported.

“While urine donors are screened for symptomatic neurological disease, a lengthy symptom-free incubation period for prion disease, during which the urine of affected donors may be infectious, is impossible to exclude without invasive testing,” said Dr. Neil Cashman, Scientific Director of PrioNet Canada and Canada Research Chair in Neurodegeneration and Protein Misfolding Diseases at the University of British Columbia, co-author of the paper.

“Based on the information we now have - including the detection of prions in urine of experimental animals, the relative ease of human-to-human transmission, the risk of prion infection through fertility drug injections, and the young age of fertility drug recipients - it is important to consider whether the risks of these products may now outweigh their benefits,” Dr. Cashman concluded.

Talk to your doctor to know your risks.

Source: PrioNet Canada, MedicalNewsToday