Searching for new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease dementia through multiple pathways

Abstract

Dementia is a group of diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease dementia, metabolic dementia and toxic dementia. The treatment of dementia mainly includes symptomatic treatment by controlling the primary disease and accompanying symptoms, nutritional support therapy for repairing nerve cells, psychological auxiliary treatment, and treatment that improves cognitive function through drugs. Among them, drug therapy to improve cognitive function is important. This review focuses on introducing and commenting on some recent progress in exploring drugs to improve cognitive function, especially the new progress in drug treatment for AD. We mainly discuss the opportunities and challenges in finding and developing new therapeutic drugs from the aspects of acetylcholinesterase, N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptor, amyloid protein, tau protein and chronic immune inflammation.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; Dementia; Cholinesterase inhibitor; Beta amyloid; Tau protein

Core Tip: The therapeutic targets for acetylcholinesterase (AChE), N-methyl-D-aspartate glutamate receptor, amyloid (Aβ) protein, tau protein and immune inflammation are still the main direction of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) drugs. Several classical AChE inhibitors are worth keeping. Although there are many experimental research results on antibodies against Aβ or tau protein, there are few successful clinical trials of drugs. The development of new drugs for chronic immune inflammation to treat AD is still in the animal experimental stage. It is necessary to establish a multi-target-oriented precision treatment system for many key links and aspects involved in the pathogenesis of AD.