Antioxidants as a preventive therapeutic option for age related neurodegenerative diseases

Abstract

Advances in our understanding for neurodegenerative mechanisms have increased significantly in last few decades. But still no novel disease modifying therapy has been developed which could prevent the disease progression and drawn our attention towards the development of new alternative therapy. The major obstacle for the development of disease therapy is incomplete knowledge about neurodegenerative mechanisms. Due to the insufficient information about neurodegenerative mechanisms no standard diagnostic tests for the detection of neurodegenerative disease could be develop to date,  causes delayed diagnosis and disease worsening. So far the exploratory reports and clinical data have suggested the involvement of oxidative stress, mitochondrial impairment and apoptosis as major neurodegenerative mechanisms. Investigations have elicited that once initiated the degeneration of neurons could not be arrested therefore in the scarcity of curative therapy we should approach for the preventive neurodegenerative therapy. Since oxidative stress has noteworthy involvement in neuronal death solely, and in connection to other death pathways therefore, antioxidants as preventive therapeutics might provide beneficial effects in age related neurodegenerative diseases. With this hypothesis in this review we are discussing about the use of antioxidants as a preventive treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Such therapies may work in the prodromal phase, or when given prophylactically. However, in the symptomatic patient there may be too much damage to the neuronal networks to restore functionality by reducing or even eliminating the primary stressor. As functional neuronal demise and excessive neuronal death are almost certainly the key factors that mediate the functional impairment, it is ostensible that preventing neuronal death and dysfunction at early stage may provide a huge clinical benefit.