Animal models in Alzheimer's disease: Biological plausibility and mood disorders

Abstract

IntroductionAlzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive deterioration of superior brain functions especially memory which generally affects older adults. Animal models of Alzheimer's are partially representative of the disease conditions under study since there is no model that fully incorporates all the characteristics that are present in humans, so similar conditions to AD in animal models should not be actually called Alzheimer's disease; however, these models are very useful for the study of several alterations involved in the pathophysiology of AD, including mainly the deterioration of memory capacity. The objective of this article is to determine the diversity of animal models of Alzheimer's disease, biological plausibility and the main affective disorders and behavior studied. MethodThe keywords “animal models of Alzheimer's disease + mood/affective disorders” were placed in the Google scholar and NCBI databases, the first 5 pages of the search were considered. Results7 animal models were found that are used to model the disease and 5 for affective disorders. ConclusionAmong the animal models found, the rat model has been the most studied in terms of mood/affective disorders. We believe that more studies are needed where molecular changes are correlated with animal behavior of AD. The mood disorders studied are depression, anxiety, dysthymia, bipolar disorder, and drug-induced affective disorders.