Endoplasmic reticulum stress features are prominent in Alzheimer disease but not in prion diseases in vivo.

Prion diseases and Alzheimer disease (AD) share a variety of clinical and neuropathologic features (e.g. progressive dementia, accumulation of abnormally folded proteins in diseased tissue, and pronounced neuronal loss) as well as pathogenic mechanisms like generation of oxidative stress molecules and complement activation.

Increased 14-3-3 immunoreactivity in glial elements in patients with multiple sclerosis.

14-3-3 proteins have been shown to be increased in the cerebrospinal fluid from patients with several kinds of neurological diseases, including multiple sclerosis (MS). To investigate whether 14-3-3 proteins are closely related to the pathogenesis of MS, we performed immunohistochemical studies for 14-3-3 in autopsied brains from ten patients with MS, five patients with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), and seven normal control subjects. Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded sections from all cases were immunostained with a specific anti-14-3-3 antibody, and some sections from the MS cases were double-immunostained with antibodies raised against 14-3-3 and glial markers.

Immunohistochemistry for the prion protein: comparison of different monoclonal antibodies in human prion disease subtypes.

Demonstration of the abnormal form of the prion protein (PrP) in the brain confirms the diagnosis of human prion disease (PrD). Using immunohistochemistry, we have compared ten monoclonal antibodies in PrD subtypes including sporadic and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), fatal familial insomnia, Alzheimer's disease (AD), and control brains. CJD subgroups were determined using Western blot analysis for the protease-resistant PrP type in combination with sequencing to determine the genotype at the methionine/valine polymorphism at codon 129 of the prion protein gene.