News Releases & Research Results One-third of the elderly are potential patients with Parkinson's disease/Lewy body dementia, whose severity is reflected by esophageal lesions

The results of research conducted by the Brain Bank for Aging Research (*), Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital and Institute of Gerontology.
(*) Operates to develop radical treatment using the tissue resources obtained through autopsies and definitive diagnoses of dead patients.

• Lewy pathology of the peripheral nervous system (sympathetic ganglia, heart, esophagus, adrenal glands, and skin) was analyzed together with the distributions of Lewy bodies in the brains of 518 elderly cases registered at the Brain Bank between 2008 and 2018.
• As a result, one-third of the elderly had Lewy pathology, whose progression was most markedly reflected by esophageal lesions particularly in the muscularis propria and adventitia within the esophageal wall. Furthermore, autonomic symptoms were common among the elderly with Lewy pathology of the esophagus.

This project was conducted with the support of the Strategic Research Program for Brain Sciences (SRPBS) by AMED.

The results were published online in the international scientific journal Acta Neuropathologica on November 5.

Tanei ZI, et al. Lewy pathology of the esophagus correlates with the progression of Lewy body disease: a Japanese cohort study of autopsy cases Acta Neuropathologica
DOI: 10.1007/s00401-020-02233-8