London - There is no evidence that eating beef, lamb, veal, cheese or milk increases the average person's risk of contracting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare, fatal disease characterized by degeneration of the brain, concludes an international team of researchers.
But those whose families have a history of dementia may be at increased risk for the disease due to genetic factors, according to their report, published the April 11th issue of The Lancet.
In a large European study, Dr. Cornelia van Duijn of Erasmus University Medical School in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and a multicentre team found that there was little or no risk of contracting the classic form of CJD from cattle or sheep products, nor from the receipt of a blood transfusion in a hospital.
But they did find a relative risk of 2.26 for people with a family history of dementia from causes other than CJD. The researchers looked at 405 patients with definite or probable CJD compared with 405 controls.
"CJD may be an autosomal dominant disorder," van Duijn told Reuters in an interview. In autosomal dominant inheritance, a gene from one parent can transmit a characteristic or gene to a child. "If a patient suffers from CJD then there is a high risk, 50%, that he or she will pass it on to the children," she said.
According to van Duijn, the study showed that patients with CJD had other types of dementia in the family, and "...most likely most of the patients with dementia suffer from some form of Alzheimer's disease," she commented.
The researchers found no evidence that people who worked with animals or leather were at risk of contracting CJD. But they did find a small relative risk for people who consumed raw meat and brain and for those who were exposed to leather products and fertilisers produced from hoofs and horns.
Interestingly, the researchers did not find a significant association between the risk of CJD and the consumption of brain and raw meat in Britain. This "...argues against a specific association..." with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) -- "mad cow" disease, they write.
Classic CJD, a rapidly progressing form of dementia, is thought to afflict about one out of every million people worldwide. It is different from new variant CJD, an atypical form of the disease, which is thought to be caused by the same infectious agent as BSE.
The researcher team said that their findings could not be extrapolated to new variant CJD.
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