Alpha-synuclein is the major component of Lewy bodies, insoluble protein aggregates, found in patients with Parkinson’s disease, diffuse Lewy body disease, and the Lewy body variant of Alzheimer’s disease. Alpha-synuclein has been found within Lewy bodies to contain many different modifications, including nitration, phosphorylation, ubiquitination, and truncation. C-terminally truncated forms o...

Lewy body disease is defined as Lewy body-related neuronal degeneration involving the nigrostriatal system, limbic-neocortical system, and peripheral autonomic nervous system (PANS). We investigated whether the adrenal gland, which is evolutionarily related to sympathetic ganglia and is routinely examined in general autopsy, could be used to assess pathology of the PANS in Lewy body disease. Br...

Brainstem and cortical Lewy bodies in diffuse Lewy body disease show intense immunoreactivity to antibodies against ubiquitin. Quantitative studies show that the novel neuropathological technique of anti-ubiquitin immunocytochemistry is more than twice as sensitive as conventional haematoxylin and eosin stains in detecting cortical Lewy bodies. Anti-ubiquitin immunocytochemistry should be regar...

We investigated a large family with levodopa-responsive, Lewy body parkinsonism in which the disease segregates as an apparent autosomal dominant trait. After performing a genome screen, we identified a chromosome 4p haplotype that segregates with the disease. However, this haplotype also occurs in individuals in the pedigree who do not have clinical Lewy body parkinsonism but rather suffer fro...

The relative importance of Lewy- and Alzheimer-type pathologies to dementia in Parkinson's disease remains unclear. We have examined the combined associations of α-synuclein, tau and amyloid-β accumulation in 56 pathologically confirmed Parkinson's disease cases, 29 of whom had developed dementia. Cortical and subcortical amyloid-β scores were obtained, while tau and α-synuclein pathologies wer...

It was in 1817 that James Parkinson first described in detail the features of the disease that was to take his name (first Paralysis agitans and subsequently Parkinson’s disease). It was not until 1912, however, that the most important pathological marker of this disease, a sort of neuronal inclusion body, was reported by Friederich H. Lewy in the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus and in the nu...

Background: Lewy body dementia is a common but frequently underdiagnosed cause of dementia often mistaken for the more familiar entity of Alzheimer disease. Clinically the distinction is important, because it can have profound implications for management. Methods: The medical literature was searched using the keywords “Lewy bodies,” “Lewy body dementia,” “Alzheimer dementia,” and “parkinsonian ...

The mechanisms underlying Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body disease have long been a controversial subject among neurologists and neuropathologists. Here, we hypothesize that three most common histopathological structures, Lewy body (LB), neurofibrillary tangle (NFT) and neuritic senile plaque (NP) found in neurodegenerative diseases are different stages of the same lesion. Lewy body disease (L...

The possibility of an association between Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease has been examined by studying the age-specific prevalence of Lewy bodies in the substantia nigra in a group of 273 control cases without Parkinson's disease and 121 cases of Alzheimer's disease. The substantia nigra was also studied in 14 cases of Down's syndrome, 13 of which had cortical Alzheimer pathology. ...