Research progress on the targets and therapies of Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Alzheimer 's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. Most of the patients have the following characteristics, such as abnormalities in memory, language, and behavioral ability. It is very common in dementia in the elderly. The pathological features are mainly the plaques formed by Aβ protein deposition and the neurofibrillary tangles. The causes of AD are complex, and there are many pathological hypotheses. The current clinical therapeutic drugs for AD are mainly cholinesterase inhibitors developed based on the cholinergic hypothesis and receptor antagonists targeting NMDA receptors. Although there are some research results on the targets based on other hypotheses, further research is needed for clinical application. Nevertheless, in recent years, there have been many new development directions, such as combination therapy. Multi-target combination therapy is expected to achieve better efficacy than traditional single-target therapy. This makes it even more important to develop drugs with different potential targets. This article introduces three current mainstream therapeutic targets and theories, and introduces the drugs based on them. At the same time, we also introduced 3 targets and therapies with good potential in the future, and introduced some current stage results and current drugs based on their research and development.