What is Amyloidosis?
Amyloidosis is a term for diseases that have in common the extracellular deposition of insoluble fibrillar proteins in tissues and organs. These diseases are a subset of a growing group of disorders recognized to be caused by misfolding of proteins; in addition to the systemic amyloidoses, these include Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, prion diseases, serpinopathies, some of the cystic fibroses, and others. A unifying feature of the amyloidoses is that the deposits share a common ß-pleated sheet structural conformation that confers unique staining properties.
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