Mátyás Imre Papp (1927–2019)
Mátyás Papp died on 4th of April, 2019, at the age of 92, following a long disease. He was working for nearly 60 years in the Department of Neurology, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary. He was internationally known for his works on the inclusion bodies (Papp‐Lantos bodies) in multiple system atrophy (MSA). He was an honorary member of the International Society of Neuropathology.
He was born in a small village in eastern Hungary in 1927 and grown up in Budapest. He started his medical studies in 1949 and continued it in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) at the Pavlov University, graduating in 1955. From this year, he started to work at the Semmelweis University, and from 1957 (when neurology as a specialty was separated from psychiatry), at the Department of Neurology. He became a consultant neurologist in addition to being a neuropathologist. The origin of the Hungarian neuropathology was closely linked to neuropsychiatry and neuropathological laboratories were established mainly in universities. Károly Schaffer (who described the collaterals of the hippocampal formation named after him) founded the neuropathology laboratory in 1912 in which Papp started to work in 1955. He was the head of the laboratory from 1970 till 2012.
He obtained his PhD degree in 1974 by studying the extracellular spaces of the brain using cholinesterase histochemistry. From the beginning of the 1980s, he started to investigate the histopathology of Alzheimer's disease using the silver impregnation technique developed by Gallyas. Looking for Alzheimer‐type changes in other nervous system disorders, he realized that a brain of a patient with Shy‐Drager syndrome exhibited numerous Gallyas‐positive inclusions, but to his surprise, in the oligodendroglial cells and only scarcely in neurons. At that time, the role of glial cells was believed to be supportive only and his findings that these cells show degenerative changes similar to those in neurons were groundbreaking. With a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in 1981 (a rare reward in socialist Hungary), he visited the Department of Neuropathology, Institute of Psychiatry in London, to work with Peter Lantos. Together they described the distribution and immunocytochemistry of these inclusion bodies and named them glial cytoplasmic inclusion (GCI). It was only later realised that inclusions also occur in neuronal cytoplasm and nucleus in MSA. The importance of the work, published in 1989, is that it has proved that striatonigral degeneration, olivopontocerebellar atrophy and Shy‐Drager syndrome are different manifestations of a single entity, the MSA; all three with the same neuropathological hallmark lesion. Acknowledging his contribution, Professor Papp was elected to be the honorary member of the International Society of Neuropathology in 2000. Almost 20 years after the publication of GCIs, in 2008, the second consensus diagnostic criteria of MSA introduced the eponym of Papp‐Lantos body and they are referred to as such in every neuropathological and neurological textbook.
In addition to defining the hallmark lesion in the second most common Parkinsonian syndrome, the discovery opened general interest in glial pathology in other neurodegenerative disorders. As a result several other glial inclusion bodies were described in the following years.
Professor Papp had a long and successful carrier both as a neuropathologist and as a neurologist and also as a teacher of medical students, neurology residents and colleagues. His name, being inseparable from MSA, will survive him in all in textbooks.