Prevention of Neurodegeneration for Alzheimer’s Disease by Lycium barbarum

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Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease that will affect more than 50 million people worldwide. AD is an aging-associated disease because the chance of suffering from AD is double after age of 65. This is a complex disease that is highly related to our environmental stress, experience of head trauma, our daily diet and exercise, quality of our sleep, and even air pollution. All these factors give multiple hits to our brain promoting neurodegeneration in the aging processes. As Lycium barbarum (Wolfberry) is an antiaging Chinese medicine, we have attempted to understand the scientific meaning of this antiaging medicine. In this chapter, we will at first summarize different risk factors leading to AD. Then, we will discuss how Wolfberry protects neurons against AD. Furthermore, we will discuss how Wolfberry prevents those risk factors leading to AD. As Chinese medicine emphasizes on prevention of disease by adjusting the whole body health from a holistic point of view, our understanding of Wolfberry will help us to advance our knowledge of how this natural product elicits multi-target effects to prevent the devastating problem of dementia.

Keywords

Alzheimer’s disease Aging Depression Diabetes mellitus Hyperhomocysteinemia β-Amyloid peptide Glutamate toxicity 
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Notes

Acknowledgement

The work is supported by the Macau Science and Technology Development Fund (053/2013/A2) to Y.S.H., HKU Alzheimer’s Disease Research Network under Strategic Research Theme of Healthy Aging, Azalea (1972) Endowment Fund, and generous donation from Ms Kit-Wan Chow to RCCC.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Laboratory of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Department of Anatomy, LKS Faculty of MedicineThe University of Hong KongHong Kong SARPeople’s Republic of China
  2. 2.School of Nursing, Faculty of Health and Social SciencesThe Hong Kong Polytechnic UniversityHong Kong SARPeople’s Republic of China
  3. 3.State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese MedicineMacau University of Science and TechnologyMacau SARPeople’s Republic of China
  4. 4.Institute of Chinese Medicinal ScienceUniversity of MacauMacau SARPeople’s Republic of China
  5. 5. Research centre of Heart, Brain, Hormone and Healthy Aging, LKS Faculty of MedicineThe University of Hong KongHong Kong SARPeople’s Republic of China
  6. 6.State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive SciencesThe University of Hong KongHong Kong SARPeople’s Republic of China

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