Review Article Is Parkinson’s Disease Truly a Prion-Like Disorder? An Appraisal of Current Evidence

License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the world’s second most common neurodegenerative disease and most common movement disorder. Characterised by a loss of dopaminergic neurons and the development of intraneuronal inclusions known as Lewy bodies, it has classically been thought of as a cell-autonomous disease. However, in 2008, two groups reported the startling observation of Lewy bodies within embryonic neuronal grafts transplanted into PD patients little more than a decade previously, suggesting that PD pathology can be propagated to neighbouring cells and calling basic assumptions of our understanding of the disease into question. Subsequent research has largely served to confirm this interpretation, pointing towards a prion-like intercellular transfer ofmisfolde