Alzheimer's Disease Essay

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a degenerative brain disease that involves dysfunctions and loss of nerve cells in central nervous system, was discovered by a German physician, Dr. Alois Alzheimer in 1907. As it is accounted for 50 to 75% of all cases of dementia, it is the most common form of dementia (Blennow et al., 2006) and it is known as a progressive neuropsychiatric disorder which involves memory loss, mood swing and loss of intellectual and social skills (Lee et al., 2010) and sufferer will progress through seven-stages of Alzheimer but with different rate (Reisberg et al., 2003).
Prevalence of dementia increases exponentially with age from 60 to 85 years old or older, which is <1% and 28%, respectively (Blennow et al., 2006), which is more common in industrialized countries (Anand, Singh, Singh, 2012). In 2001, the whole worldwide prevalence of dementia is estimated to be 24 million and is predicted to double every 20 years, affecting 80 million people by 2040 (Hampel et al., 2011). World Alzheimer Report 2013 had reported that over 35 million people have Alzheimer’s or related dementia (Alzheimer’s Disease International, 2013) and 33% of seniors die due to Alzheimer’s or other dementia. From 21 studies made, $1500 to $ 91000 is required for an individual’s Alzheimer’s therapy. Global cost is estimated to be $ 604 billion, 1% of entire world’s gross domestic product (Alzheimer’s Disease International, 2010).
Senile plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, loss of synapses and degeneration of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons are the neuropathological hallmarks of this disease (Shen et al., 2005). It is a neurodegenerative disorder with unknown cause (Blennow et al., 2006). There are some hypotheses of pathogenesis of Alzheimer’...

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... are able to interfere some metabolic pathways of choline metabolism. Hence, they have broad range on neurologic effects. From the experiment, monosubstituted 2-aminoethanols give the least inhibitory activity. There will be an increase in inhibitory activity when the degree of substitution and molecular size of the nitrogenous head of the molecule increase, due to the increase in the chance for van der Waals’ interaction with the protein surface, results in increased enzyme inhibition (Hartung, 1968). This complied with the principle of inhibitors with tertiary amino compounds act on PAS site. Enzyme inhibition occurs by steric blockade (Rosenberry et al., 1999) or allosteric activation (Auletta et al., 2010) will give low number of empty enzymes for further hydrolysis. Therefore, dialkylaminoflavonols shold be futher investigated in the discovery of better drugs.