Lewy bodies are the build-up of a protein called alpha-synuclein are found in some brain cells in people who had Lewy body diseases, such as Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Nobody really knows why they form or what they do in the brain, but because they seem to only occur when people have neurodegenerative diseases it has long been thought that they could be damaging the brain. However, our recent research suggests that Lewy bodies might actually protect brain cells from damage to the parts of cells that produce energy, the mitochondria, and this might suggest Lewy bodies are not harmful. 

Our current work is trying to understand what makes brain cells with Lewy bodies different from those that don't have Lewy bodies. To do this, we are using post-mortem brain tissue from people with Lewy body diseases compared to older people without neurodegenerative diseases, all of whom generously donated tissue to Newcastle Brain Tissue Resource after they died. We hope this work will help us understand what Lewy bodies are doing in the brain. This information is important as many current drugs in development aim to prevent alpha-synuclein sticking together to form Lewy bodies; therefore, we think it is really important to make sure these are harmful before investing further time, money and hope in such drugs.