Author(s)

Haoyuan Liu

Corresponding Author

Haoyuan Liu

ABSTRACT

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an insidious and progressive neurodegenerative disease, and the incidence rate is generally high with the age above 70. In 2015, the number of people with dementia worldwide reached 46.8 million, and 50-75 percent were AD. The expected number of patients with AD will reach 131 million by 2050. AD can cause serious effects, including abnormal behaviors and cognitive dysfunction. The neuropathological examination can help confirm the diagnosis of early stage. However, if daily life and social functioning are significantly impaired, it will be considered as severe symptoms. In the current stage, the treatment of AD relies on traditional medications, such as donepezil and memantine. The two most indispensable mechanisms are tau protein buildup and Amyloid-beta (Aβ) deposit, which can cause neurotoxicity and cellular decay. Although people have a certain understanding of AD, the mechanisms are not optimized yet. The existing treatment methods can only try to control the development of the disease; however, the recovery of patients is continuously being studied. In this review, a comprehensive understanding of the pathology and existing treatments can help further analyze AD and investigate the future development of treatments. It introduces a general overview of pathology including the factor of aging, hippocampal alterations, and oxidative stress. Tau proteins and Aβ are also mentioned as two portions of mechanisms. Moreover, several potential treatment options have been proposed, such as anti-amyloid therapy, monoclonal antibodies, tau-targeted therapy. iPSC and CRISPR belong to two types of future treatments that are also being tested to be effective against AD.

KEYWORDS

Alzheimer’s disease, hippocampus, oxidative stress, tau protein, Amyloid-beta, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)