Alzheimer's Disease and Animal Models
Müge İpek Konaklı1, Oytun Erbaş1,2
1ERBAS Institute of Experimental Medicine, Illinois, USA & Gebze, Turkey
2Department of Physiology, Medical Faculty of Demiroğlu Bilim University, Istanbul, Turkey
Keywords: Aluminum Chloride model, Alzheimer's disease, animal memory tests, cholinergic dysfunction, experimental animal models, intracerebroventricular streptozotocin model
Abstract
Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that has not yet been cured, and its incidence has been shown to increase with age. As life expectancy in the developed world has been growing over the years, the effects of Alzheimer’s has grown to become a social problem, too. Treatments based on the amyloid cascade and tau protein hypotheses, which are the two main pathogeneses of the disease, have not been proving as successful as expected in clinical studies. For this reason, researchers working on new types of medications, first use experimental animal models and tests, as much as needed to make sure they produce results that are efficient enough in treatment. Thus, by trying to develop new approaches, treatment methods are sought. In this review, hypotheses including amyloid deposits, taupathy, increased inflammation, cholinergic loss, oxidative stress and glucose hypometabolism are mentioned in order to better understand the mechanism of developing Alzheimer's disease. Models have been described in experimental animals by intra-cerebroventricular streptozotocin, aluminum chloride administration and cholinergic dysfunction. The models have also been subjected to certain memory tests to proofread the methods used.
The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.