Health officials from New Hampshire confirms Monday that the patient who underwent brain surgery in Catholic Medical Center in Concord had died due to rare brain disease, based on his autopsy results.

It was previously reported that aside from this patient, a number of patients that have had brain surgery in the New Hampshire hospital may have also been exposed to Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease (CJD) through tainted equipments.

The patient’s body was analyzed by the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center for autopsy and the results came out in Sept. 16 confirming the assumptions. Public health officials said that the deceased patient may have also exposed eight other patients to the deadly CJD because the abnormal protein that causes the disease cannot be terminated through standard sterilization techniques.

Five more patients in Connecticut and Massachusetts were also notified because the instruments believed to be tainted with CJD were just rented and may have been used in some places. However, public health officials say transmission is extremely rare.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease progresses quickly once symptoms present and is deadly all the time, usually within a few months time. Symptoms, on the other hand, take decades to show up. Behavioral changes, impaired coordination, memory loss and other neurological changes and abnormalities are common symptoms of CJD.

Almost 90 percent of CJD cases happen spontaneously mainly because abnormal proteins cannot be terminated in standard sterilization process.

According to National Institutes of Health, about 200 cases of CJD are recorded yearly in the United States. The disease that happens to be transmitted by exposure to brain or nervous system tissue accounts for less than one percent and there were only four cases of transmission – not in the U.S. -- through usage of tainted surgical instruments.