Pathology findings in Psychiatry
There are a vast number of pathology findings but you only need to be aware of the ones relevant to psychiatry. The table below attempts to summarize the ones that come up in the exams along with others that might.
| Finding | Associated condition | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Papp-Lantos bodies | Multisystem atrophy | Glial cytoplasmic inclusion bodies visible in the CNS |
| Pick bodies | Frontotemporal dementia | Large, dark-staining aggregates of proteins in neurological tissue |
| Lewy bodies | Parkinson's disease and Lewy Body dementia | Round, concentrically laminated, pale eosinophilic cytoplasmic inclusions (aggregates of alpha-synuclein) |
| Asteroid bodies | Sarcoidosis and berylliosis | Acidophilic, stellate inclusions in giant cells |
| Barr bodies | Stains of X chromosomes | Inactivated X chromosome - dark staining mass in contact with the nuclear membrane |
| Mallory bodies | Found in alcoholic hepatitis, alcoholic cirrhosis, Wilson's disease, primary-biliary cirrhosis | Alcoholic hyalin - eosinophilic intracytoplasmic inclusions in hepatocytes: intermediate filaments, predominantly prekeratin |
| Schaumann bodies | Sarcoidosis and berylliosis | Concentrically laminated inclusions (up to 50µm) in giant cells |
| Zebra bodies | Niemann-Pick disease, Tay-Sachs disease, or any of the mucopolysaccharidoses | Palisaded lamellated membranous cytoplasmic bodies seen in macrophages |
| LE bodies (AKA hematoxylin bodies) | SLE (lupus) | Nuclei of damaged cells with bound anti-nuclear antibodies which become homogeneous and loose chromatin pattern |
| Verocay bodies | Schwannoma (Neurilemoma) | Palisades of nuclei at the end of a fibrillar bundle |
| Hirano bodies | Normal aging but more numerous in Alzheimers disease | Eosinophilic, football shaped inclusion seen in neurons of the brain |
| Neurofibrillary Tangles | Alzheimer's disease | Microtubule-associated proteins and neurofilaments |
| Kayser-Fleischer rings | Wilson's disease | Rings of discoloration on cornea |
| Kuru plaques | Kuru and Gerstmann-Sträussler syndrome, and are sometimes present in patients with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) | Kuru plaques are composed partly of a host-encoded prion protein |
