Prionlike Disease Processes My Underlie Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

A chain reaction of toxic proteins may help explain major neurodegenerative diseases—and could suggest new treatment options

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Under a microscope, a pathologist searching through the damaged nerve cells in a brain tissue sample from a patient who has died of Alzheimer's disease can make out strange clumps of material. They consist of proteins that clearly do not belong there. Where did they come from, and why are there so many of them? And most important, what do they have to do with this devastating and incurable disorder? The search for answers has turned up a startling discovery: the clumped proteins in Alzheimer's and other major neurodegenerative diseases behave very much like prions, the toxic proteins that destroy the brain in mad cow disease.

Prions are misshapen yet durable versions of proteins normally present in nerve cells that cause like proteins to misfold and clump together, starting a chain reaction that eventually consumes entire brain regions. In the past 15 years scientists have learned that such a process may be at work not only in mad cow and other exotic diseases but also in major neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), and the concussion-related dementia of football players and boxers.

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