The contribution of Alois Alzheimer and Oskar Fischer to the understanding of Pick’s complex

Abstract

Arnold Pick described a series of cases with progressive aphasia, behavioural disorders, and dementia. The post-mortem examination revealed on macroscopy, beside diffuse brain atrophy, also circumscribed (lobar) atrophy of the temporal and/or frontal lobes. The histopathology was not provided. Such kind of cases were soon named after the author, being known for a time as ‘Pick’s disease’, coming to constitute a new nosological group. A time later after the original description, Alois Alzheimer and Oskar Fischer completed microscopic examination of similar cases, where the first author found, on silver impregnation, spheric neuronal inclusions, he named ‘argentophilic ball’ inclusions, while the second one identified complex cortical changes he named ‘spongiform cortical wasting’, and additionally a type of swollen cell that was named ‘ballooned neuron’. Such microscopic changes became the first histopathological markers of this group of diseases.