Autophagy is essentially a form of intracellular phagocytosis in which acell actively consumes damaged organelles or misfolded proteins byencapsulating them into an autophagosome, which fuses with alysosome to destroy the contents of the autophagosome.• Many neurodegenerative diseases show unusual protein aggregates.This could potentially be a result of underlying autophagic defectcommon to multiple neurodegenerative diseases.• It is important to note that this is a hypothesis, and more research mustbe done.