Kim Hyo Geun, Oh Myung Sook
Department of Oriental Pharmaceutical Science, College of Pharmacy, Kyung Hee University, #1 Hoegi-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130-701, Korea.
Curr Pharm Des. 2012 Jan 1.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disorder and is the most common cause of progressive dementia in aging. Research on AD therapy has been partly successful in terms of developing symptomatic treatments, but there have been a number of failures with regard to developing disease-modifying therapies. The pathogenesis of AD remains unclear and the present one-drug, one-target paradigm for anti-AD treatment appears to be clinically unsuccessful. In many countries, traditional herbal medicines are used to prevent or treat neurodegenerative disorders, and some have been developed as nutraceuticals or functional foods. This review briefly introduces progress in the development of anti-AD treatments and then focuses on recent advances in the research, characteristics, and development of herbal medicines. Because AD arises via multiple pathological or neurotoxic pathways, herbal medicines have the potential to be developed into optimum pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals for AD because of their multi-function, multi-target characteristics.
阿尔茨海默病（AD）是一种慢性神经退行性疾病，是老年人进行性痴呆最常见的病因。在开发对症治疗方面，AD治疗研究已取得部分成功，但在开发疾病修饰疗法方面却有诸多失败案例。AD的发病机制尚不清楚，目前抗AD治疗的单一药物、单一靶点模式在临床上似乎并不成功。在许多国家，传统草药被用于预防或治疗神经退行性疾病，有些已被开发为营养保健品或功能性食品。本文综述简要介绍了抗AD治疗的发展进展，然后重点阐述了草药研究、特性及开发方面的最新进展。由于AD通过多种病理或神经毒性途径发病，草药因其多功能、多靶点特性，有潜力被开发成治疗AD的最佳药物和营养保健品。
