The first scientist to describe a protein-folding disorder was Stanley Prusiner, who observed misfolding in the 1980s in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare disorder. Other scientists, as we have seen, went on to show that protein misfolding contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. At first glance, these dementias might seem to have little, if anything, in common with movement disorders. But a closer look reveals that Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease also result from protein misfolding. We will turn to those brain disorders in chapter 7.
