(Gizmodo) – A woman’s human growth hormone treatments in childhood may have sealed her fate decades later, according to a new case report.

The grim reaper can sometimes take decades to catch up with its victims. In a report out this week, scientists describe a woman who died from an incurable prion disease caught roughly 50 years earlier.

Doctors detailed the unusual case in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The 58-year-old woman developed a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) likely contracted through contaminated human growth hormone (HGH) treatments she received as a child, they determined. The tragic death may represent the longest latency period ever documented for this universally fatal disease. (Read More)