Novel Approaches for the Treatment of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Neurodegenerative disorders affect around one billion people worldwide. They can arise from a combination of genomic, epigenomic, metabolic, and environmental factors. Aging is the leading risk factor for most chronic illnesses of old age, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. A progressive neurodegenerative process and neuroinflammation occur, and no current therapies can prevent, slow, or halt disease progression. To date, no novel disease-modifying therapies have been shown to provide significant benefit for patients who suffer from these devastating disorders. Therefore, early diagnosis and the discovery of new targets and novel therapies are of upmost importance. Neurodegenerative diseases, like in other age-related disorders, the progression of pathology begins many years before the onset of symptoms. Many efforts in this field have led to the conclusion that exits some similar events among these diseases that can explain why the aging brain is so vulnerable to suffer neurodegenerative diseases. This article reviews the current knowledge about these diseases by summarizing the most common features of major neurodegenerative disorders, their causes and consequences, and the proposed novel therapeutic approaches.

Polyphenols from Food and Natural Products: Neuroprotection and Safety

“…Numerous studies [26][27][28][29] have been dedicated to the cellular mechanisms for neurodegeneration in several pathological conditions, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's disease, as well as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. However, there are currently no effective therapies available to treat such diseases besides symptom amelioration [30,31].…”

Resveratrol Derivatives as Potential Treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease

“…Thereby, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (e.g., donepezil, galantamine, and rivastigmine) and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonists (e.g., memantine) are used for AD treatment. On the other hand, drugs that increase the synaptic availability of dopamine, such as the precursor of this neurotransmitter (levodopa) and inhibitors of enzymes involved in dopamine metabolism (e.g., carbidopa, entacapone, rasagiline), as well as agonists of dopamine receptors (e.g., pramipexole, ropinirole), are prescribed for patients with PD (Oertel and Schulz, 2016;Van Bulck et al, 2019).…”

“…The development of new treatments to combat neurodegenerative diseases requires a better understanding of the underlying pathophysiological processes, elucidating how genetic alterations interact with environmental factors to produce neurodegeneration. Thus, alterations of proteostasis, mitochondrial function, autophagy, redox status, metal and calcium metabolism, as well as neuroinflammation and neurogenesis have become potential therapeutic drug targets that are expected to modify the progression of these illnesses (Van Bulck et al, 2019;Elkouzi et al, 2019). However, obtaining an effective and safe drug for these diseases entails great difficulty considering that not all the molecules evaluated in preclinical studies are viable during the development of clinical trials; for example, between 2002 and 2012, there were 244 drugs registered in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for clinical studies, and only one received permission to be used in patients with AD (Alzheimer's Association, 2018).…”

A frontline defense against neurodegenerative diseases:the development of early disease detection methods

“…During more than the last decade, all disease-modifying clinical trials enrolling participants in symptomatic AD stages failed. In the future any disease-modifying treatment should start earlier, possibly in the asymptomatic phase [6].…”