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Concept
Lewy body
Summary
Lewy bodies are the inclusion bodies – abnormal aggregations of protein – that develop inside nerve cells affected by Parkinson's disease (PD), the Lewy body dementias (Parkinson's disease dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB)), and some other disorders. They are also seen in cases of multiple system atrophy, particularly the parkinsonian variant (MSA-P).
Lewy bodies appear as spherical masses in the cytoplasm that displace other cell components. For instance, some Lewy bodies tend to displace the nucleus to one side of the cell. There are two main kinds of Lewy bodies: classical and cortical. Lewy bodies may be found in the midbrain (within the substantia nigra) or within the cortex. A classical Lewy body is an eosinophilic cytoplasmic inclusion consisting of a dense core surrounded by a halo of 10 nm wide radiating fibrils, the primary structural component of which is alpha-synuclein.
In 1910, Fritz Heinrich Lewy was studying in Berlin for his doctorate. He was the first doctor to notice some unusual proteins in the brain, comparing them to earlier findings by Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora. In 1913, Lafora described another case, and acknowledged Lewy as the discoverer, naming them cuerpos intracelulares de Lewy (intracellular Lewy bodies). Konstantin Nikolaevich Trétiakoff found them in 1919 in the substantia nigra of PD brains, called them corps de Lewy and is credited with the eponym. In 1923, Lewy published his findings in a book, The Study on Muscle Tone and Movement. Including Systematic Investigations on the Clinic, Physiology, Pathology, and Pathogenesis of Paralysis agitans. Eliasz Engelhardt, who is in the neurology department at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, argued in 2017 that Lafora should be credited with the eponym, because he named them six years before Trétiakoff. Nonetheless, Trétiakoff is still the primary figure acknowledged for coining the term, “Lewy bodies.”
According to the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Dr.
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