Isabelle Lousada was in her early 30s when she collapsed at her Philadelphia wedding in 1995. A London architect, she had suffered a decade of mysterious symptoms: tingling fingers, swollen ankles, a belly distended by her enlarged liver. The doctors she first consulted suggested she had chronic fatigue syndrome or that she’d been partying and drinking too hard.
But her new brother-in-law, a cardiologist, felt that something else must be going on. A fresh series of doctor’s visits led, finally, to the proper diagnosis: Malformed proteins had glommed together inside Lousada’s bloodstream and organs. Those giant protein globs are called amyloid, and the diagnosis was amyloidosis.
Amyloid diseases that affect the brain, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, receive the lion’s share of attention from medical professionals and the press. In contrast, amyloid diseases that affect other body parts are less familiar and rarely diagnosed conditions, says Gareth Morgan, a ...
