Antioxidant therapies for Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Alzheimers disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease featuring progressive impairments in memory, cognition, and behavior and ultimately leads to death. The histopathological changes of Alzheimers disease include neuronal and synaptic loss, formation of extracellular senile plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles in brain. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that oxidative stress not only strongly participates in an early stage of Alzheimers disease prior to cytopathology, but plays an important role in inducing and activating multiple cell signaling pathways that contribute to the lesion formations of toxic substances and then promotes the development of Alzheimers disease. Many years of studies show that antioxidant therapies have enjoyed general success in preclinical studies. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on the recent developments of common used antioxidant therapies for Alzheimers disease and thus provides indications for future potential antioxidant therapeutic strategies of neurodegenerative diseases. Copyright © 2012 Ye Feng and Xiaochuan Wang.