Hsiu-Chih Liu
Wen-Jang Wong
Shuu-Jiun Wang
The Neurological Institute Taipei Veterans General Hospital
Pharmacological treatment of cognition in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been advanced in recent years. There are three aspects of treatment of AD: symptomatic treatment, delaying course and curative or preventive treatment. At present, pharmacological treatment of AD is still in the stage of symptomatic, mainly cholinesterase inhibitors. The FDA of the U.S. has approved three cholinesterase inhibitors: tacrine, donepezil and rivastigmine. In general, these agents improve the cognition in about one-third of AD patients. Drugs that have been proposed in delaying the course of AD include antioxidants, estrogen and anti-inflammatory drugs. One way to cure the AD is to prevent the formation of β-amyloid, one of the main pathological findings in the brain of AD patients. β-amyloid is a product of amyloid precursor protein (APP) after being cleaved byβand γsecretases. In 1999, several investigators have found the gene and protein of β-site APP-cleaving enzyme. These findings might lead the scientists to develop the drugs preventing the formation of amyloid in the future.
Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, cognition, cholinesterase inhibitors,β-amyloid