ERN1 and prion disease: To ensure that special handling of prion infected brain tissue and a relative long post mortem delay could affect the detection of the phospho-epitopes of IRE1 and PERK, pIRE1 and pPERK immunoreactivity was assessed on AD hippocampus tissue that underwent the same handling and had similar or longer post-mortem delay as about half of all prion disease cases included in this study.