The pharmacological treatment of Alzheimer's disease with cholinesterase inhibitors and memantine

Abstract

The treatment of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is now a fast evolving field of both basic scientific and clinical research. The use of the currently licensed cholinesterase inhibitor (ChEI) drugs is based on the findings in the midto- late 1970s, and early 1980s, of reduced levels of cholinergic markers in the brain of people who died with AD, mainly in the later stages of severe dementia. These changes were shown to correlate with the severity of pathological and clinical signs of the disease, and led to early attempts to evaluate physostigmine in AD patients (Davis, Mohs, & Tinklenberg, 1979), with more sophisticated trials following later (Asthana et al., 1995; Thal, Ferguson, Mintzer, Raskin, & Targum, 1999).