Amyloid plaques and Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) the most common dementia and Brain disorder. Amyloid plaques and neurofibrillarytangles are two main causes of AD that are usually associated with cerebral amyloid angiopathy. Imbalance betweenAβ production and its removal from the brain is the main cause of Aβ accumulation and its pathogenesis.Intraneuronal Aβ aggreagates result in endolysosomal-autophagic dysfunctions followed by formation ofauthophagic vacuoles and damaged mitochondria in neurons. The amyloid plaques at early stages of AD are detectedin the neocortex and hippocampus which extended to the other brain areas associated with conversion frompreclinical to symptomatic AD. It is argued that these genetic and molecular biological data provide strong supportfor the veracity of the ‘amyloid cascade hypothesis’ for disease pathogenesis, and that this hypothesis offers acoherent framework for drug discovery. In this study, we review the latest findings on pathophysiology of Aβ andtheir roles in pathogenesis of AD as well as their importance as targets for treatment of AD.

Keywords:

Alzheimer’s disease , Amyloid plaques , Authophagic vacuoles