Abstracto

Current and future treatments of memory complaints and Alzheimer\'s disease

William K Summers

The cost of the 5.3 million Alzheimer’s patients in the USA exceeds US$100 billion per year. This is sufficient motivation to stimulate the pharmaceutical industry to seek a cure. To date, there are four anticholinesterase inhibitors, and an NMDA antagonist. At present 914 clinical trials related to Alzheimer’s disease have been listed, and 157 of these are in Phase III. New drugs that pursue Alzheimer’s prevention and treatment depend upon six different hypotheses as to the cause of Alzheimer’s. These hypotheses are: amyloid hypothesis, tau protein hypothesis, inflammation hypothesis, oxidative stress hypothesis, vascular hypothesis and hibernation hypothesis. These theories and potential therapies are reviewed in this article. The lack of current therapies may be due to the inability of agents to demonstrate efficacy in clinical trials because of flaws in testing instruments and current research designs. Of the theories, a complex antioxidant or combination with CNS inflammatory downmodulation holds the best promise of an effective treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.