[Pharmacological treatment of Alzheimer's disease]

Management of Alzheimer disease includes sedatives, neuroleptic and hypnotic agents for behavior disorders family-directed therapy; activities to maintain functional abilities; care of overall health status and disease specific therapies. The therapeutic attempts specifically based on known or postulated neurophysiological abnormalities are the neurotransmitter replacement therapies (cholinergic enhancement strategies and others); the treatment or prevention of cytoscheletical abnormalities and the neuronal metabolic enhancement with nootropics. There is no definitely useful specific therapy for Alzheimer disease at present. However, increasing research on cholinergic mechanisms, galaninergic interneurons, nerve growth factor and neural grafts, metabolism of amyloid an others, will hopefully lead to useful therapies in the near future.