Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible chronic neurodegenerative disorder that occurs when neurons in the brain degenerate and die. Pain frequently arises in older patients with neurodegenerative diseases including AD. However, the presence of pain in older people is usually overlooked with cognitive dysfunctions. Most of the times dementia patients experience moderate to severe pain but the development of severe cognitive dysfunctions tremendously affects their capability to express the presence of pain. Currently, there are no effective treatments against AD that emphasize the necessity for increasing research to develop novel drugs for treating or preventing the disease process. Furthermore, the prospective therapeutic use of cannabinoids in AD has been studied for the past few years. In this regard, targeting the endocannabinoid system has considered as a probable therapeutic strategy to control several associated pathological pathways, such as mitochondrial dysfunction, excitotoxicity, oxidative stress, and neuroinflammation for the management of AD. In this review, we focus on recent studies about the role of cannabinoids for the treatment of pain and related neuropathological changes in AD.
Highlights
Pain is a complex emotional and perceptual experience, which has sensory, cognitive, and affective dimensions (Bushnell et al, 2013; Talbot et al, 2019)
There is a cortical response to nociceptive stimuli under vegetative as well as minimal conscious state, the pain perception appears crucial for survival and needs assessment in the absence of people with severe cognitive dysfunctions (De Tommaso et al, 2013)
The neuroprotective activity of HU-211 caused by direct binding to NMDA receptors, not to cannabinoid receptors, ; the widely considered cannabinoid-induced neuroprotective effects against excitotoxicity may be accomplished through several mechanisms, including suppression of presynaptic glutamate release (Marsicano et al, 2003), interruption of voltage-dependent calcium channels (Mackie and Hille, 1992), and the prohibition of calcium release
Summary
Pain is a complex emotional and perceptual experience, which has sensory, cognitive, and affective dimensions (Bushnell et al, 2013; Talbot et al, 2019). Neuropathological alterations that take place in dementia patients are accountable for changes in the perception of pain (Van Kooten et al, 2016). Though these changes can be common in different forms of dementia, scientists are trying to investigate the pain perception and processing in the patients of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is characterized by behavioral and cognitive impairments (Al Mamun et al, 2020b; Uddin et al, 2020a; Uddin et al, 2020l).
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