  
Variant CJD claims oldest victim yet
Last Updated: 2001-04-27 10:28:14 EDT (Reuters Health)
LONDON (Reuters) - More older people can be expected to develop variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease"), physicians said after a 74-year-old UK man became the oldest known victim of the disease.
The patient, a retired electrician, had no family history of brain disease and was healthy until he complained of pains in his hands and then became forgetful and started having hallucinations and paranoid delusions.
Variant CJD was diagnosed after an autopsy was requested on the basis that some of the man's symptoms were not associated with dementia and he died just 7 months after they began. He had been known to eat meat pies and sausages at least once every week and pate every month.
So far, most of the 95 cases of the brain-wasting illness reported in Britain have been in people decades younger than this patient. But Professor James Ironside, of the CJD Surveillance Unit at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, and colleagues said that more cases of the disease could occur in people in their 50s, 60s and 70s.
"This case has important implications for the surveillance of vCJD, and raises the possibility that cases of vCJD in the elderly might be missed," they stated in a letter published in the April 28th issue of The Lancet.
Physicians "should be aware that vCJD can arise in elderly patients so that appropriate investigations are done," the authors added.
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