scholarly journals Treating Alzheimer’s disease with monoclonal antibodies: current status and outlook for the future

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels D Prins ◽  
Philip Scheltens
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-63
Author(s):  
Evelyn Chou

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a currently incurable neurodegenerative disorder whose treatment poses a big challenge. Proposed causes of AD include the cholinergic, amyloid and tau hypotheses. Current therapeutic treatments have been aimed at dealing with the neurotransmitter imbalance. These include cholinesterase inhibitors and N-Methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonists. However, current therapeutics have been unable to halt AD progression. Much research has gone into the development of disease-modifying drugs to interfere with the course of the disease. Approaches include secretase inhibition and immunotherapy aimed at reducing plaque deposition. However, these have not been successful in curing AD as yet. It is believed that the main reason why therapeutics have failed to work is that treatment begins too late in the course of the disease. The future of AD treatment thus appears to lie with prevention rather than cure. In this article, current therapeutics and, from there, the future of AD treatment are discussed.


2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 228
Author(s):  
José L Molinuevo ◽  

Two effective symptomatic therapies are available for Alzheimer’s disease: the cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) and memantine, an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist. Current data demonstrate that combination therapy with memantine and a ChEI produces symptomatic benefits in all domains of AD. The benefits of combination therapy are greater than those of ChEI monotherapy, are sustained long term and appear to increase with time.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. P579-P579 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arielle Burstein ◽  
Olivia DaDalt ◽  
Birgit Kramer ◽  
Lisa D'Ambrosio ◽  
Joseph Coughlin

Author(s):  
R.J. Bateman ◽  
K. Blennow ◽  
R. Doody ◽  
S. Hendrix ◽  
S. Lovestone ◽  
...  

There is an urgent need to develop reliable and sensitive blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) that can be used for screening and to increase the efficiency of clinical trials. The European Union-North American Clinical Trials in Alzheimer’s Disease Task Force (EU/US CTAD Task Force) discussed the current status of blood-based AD biomarker development at its 2018 annual meeting in Barcelona, Spain. Recent improvements in technologies to assess plasma levels of amyloid beta indicate that a single sample of blood could provide an accurate estimate of brain amyloid positivity. Plasma neurofilament light protein appears to provide a good marker of neurodegeneration, although not specific for AD. Plasma tau shows some promising results but weak or no correlation with CSF tau levels, which may reflect rapid clearance of tau in the bloodstream. Blood samples analyzed using -omics and other approaches are also in development and may provide important insight into disease mechanisms as well as biomarker profiles for disease prediction. To advance these technologies, international multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder collaboration is essential.


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