Alzheimer’s Disease and Stem Cell Therapy

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder mainly caused by aggregation of neurofibrillary tangles and beta-amyloid plaques. As the most common cause of dementia, the population of AD patients has risen significantly in recent years. Due to the difficulty to diagnose AD at its early stage and the rapid development of the disease, AD is still an unsolved puzzle in the medical world. Though there are treatments for delaying symptoms of AD such as anti-amyloid therapy and medicine treatments that contain Cholinesterase inhibitors therapy, efficient therapies which treat AD fundamentally are yet to be discovered. The review paper will focus on one of the most promising therapies for AD, stem cell therapy. Compared to slowing down the disease, stem cell therapy can actually help the patients to grow brand-new neurons hence the treatment is pretty worthy to be studied. Stem cells are undifferentiated cells that are able to develop into new brain cells. There are four types of stem cell therapies for Alzheimer’s Disease: Mesenchymal Stem Cells therapy, Neural Stem Cell therapy, Embryonic Stem Cell therapy, and Induced Pluripotent stem Cell therapy. Among all the stem cell therapies, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) therapy has the most potential to work out due to the successful trials upon rodent animal models. Nevertheless, no stem cell therapy for AD succeeds in human trials so far. Besides, the likelihood of cancer and tumor should also be taken into consideration.