What Is Lewy Body?
In 1912, German-American medical doctor and neurologist Fritz Jacob Heinrich Lewy published a paper describing proteins he found in the nuclei of brain cells of Parkinson’s patients. These proteins, later named Lewy bodies in his honor, also play a role in a related type of dementia.
Doctors initially thought Lewy body dementia to be rare, but new immunocytochemical methods used to identify the proteins in the 1980s revealed it to be more common. Based on criteria established in 1996, LBD is currently thought to affect over 1 million Americans.
