Pick's Disease

Pick's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease that causes progressive destruction of nerve cells in the brain. Symptoms include loss of speech (aphasia) and dementia. While some of the symptoms can initially be alleviated, the disease progresses and patients often die within two to ten years. A defining characteristic of the disease is build-up of tau proteins in neurons, accumulating into silver-staining, spherical aggregations known as "Pick bodies".

While the term Pick's disease was once used to represent a class of clinical syndromes with symptoms attributable to frontal and temporal lobe dysfunction, it is now used among professionals to mean a specific pathology that is just one of the causes of frontotemporal lobar degeneration. Some people still use the term Pick's disease to mean the more general clinical syndrome of frontotemporal lobar degeneration, but this has previously led to confusion among both professionals and patients and so its use should be restricted to the specific pathological subtype described below. It is also known as Pick disease and PiD (not to be confused with Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID) or Parkinson's Disease (PD)).