A Review of Animal Models of Alzheimer's Disease: a brief insight to Pharmacologic and genetic models

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of neurodegenerative disorders. Memory loss in an alert person and impairment in the function of language, attention, perception, judgment or problem solving can occur in patients with AD. However, there are some medications in order to delay the debilitating aspects of the disease; but unfortunately, scientists could not found approaches to cure this progressive problem. Hence, in order to investigate the exact mechanisms underlying the disease and to discover novel drugs that can slow the progress or alleviate the clinical symptoms of AD, producing a model which can express the most pathophysiologic and behavioral features of the disease is a desire. Nowadays, there are different animal models developed by use of pharmacologic agents and/or genetic manipulations. In this paper, we aimed to describe different animal models of AD, genetic and pharmacologic, that are mostly used by researchers. © 2016, Iranian Society of Physiology and Pharmacology. All rights reserved.