ABSTRACT
In 1906, a German physician named Alois Alzheimer described the two major pathologic features, amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs), found in the brain of an elderly woman with a dementia-causing neurodegenerative disorder that later became known as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Subsequently, various histological dyes and stains including silver were used to identify these lesions in autopsied brain tissue. In 1984, Glenner and Wong purified and chemically identified amyloid-
β
protein (A
β
), a 4-kD monomer, from meningeal blood vessels.
