Aporphines and Alzheimer's Disease: Towards a Medical Approach Facing the Future

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that reduces progressively the part cognitive inside the Central Nervous System (CNS) and that affects the memories and emotions of the patients who endure this disease. Many drugs have been assessed in patients with different evolutionary grades of the disease, having diverse results, depending on the used compound. Some of them afford dependence and many others with side effects that affect the emotional part and the economic cost of the treatment. The natural products have diversified their therapeutic uses, and have been used in the treatment of AD in accordance with its easy medical administration and bioavailability. In this review, the use of aporphines in nature for treating Alzheimer's disease, alkaloids isolated from natural and/or synthetic sources have been used principally as cholinesterase inhibitors (acetyl- and butyrylcholinesterase) as galantamine, for instance, though its use has been questioned for being slightly effective or marginal. The use of aporphines give the possibility of generating new treatments with nitrogenous chemical structures of diverse complexity and that are focused in this review comparatively and with real therapeutic scopes.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; Aporphines; apomorphine; dopamine; neurodegenerative disease; oxoaporphines..