Current advances in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease: focused on considerations targeting Aβ and tau

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that impairs mainly the memory and cognitive function in elderly. Extracellular beta amyloid deposition and intracellular tau hyperphosphorylation are the two pathological events that are thought to cause neuronal dysfunction in AD. Since the detailed mechanisms that underlie the pathogenesis of AD are still not clear, the current treatments are those drugs that can alleviate the symptoms of AD patients. Recent studies have indicated that these symptom-reliving drugs also have the ability of regulating amyloid precursor protein processing and tau phosphorylation. Thus the pharmacological mechanism of these drugs may be too simply-evaluated. This review summarizes the current status of AD therapy and some potential preclinical considerations that target beta amyloid and tau protein are also discussed. © 2012 Hong-Qi et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.