What these reports documented for the first time was the presence of a devastating brain disorder that likely accounted for much of what Robin had been experiencing in his final years, and which had never been fully diagnosed in his lifetime. Lewy body disease, a dementia believed to affect more than 1.3 million people in America—and far more men than women—results from a buildup of protein deposits in the brain. “There’s a protein that is normally useful in the brain, and it starts to accumulate abnormally, and it’s toxic,” said the neurologist Douglas Scharre of the Wexner Medical Center at
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.robin_williams .neuroscience .dementia
