Phenolic compounds as anti-Alzheimer’s disease agents

Alzheimer’s disease, the main cause of dementia worldwide, is a slowly progressive neurodegenerative disorder. This disease involves a diversity of etiophatogenic processes as it is not only a genetic but also a biological and environmental disease. Owing to that complexity, nowadays there is no efficacious treatment for this disorder. The major Alzheimer’s disease clinical indications include extracellular senile plaques of amyloid-β protein, intracellular hyperphosphorylated τ neurofibrillary tangles, uncommon neuroinflammatory response, oxidative stress, and synaptic and neuronal dysfunction. The evaluation of the neuroprotective potential of new compounds is imperative. As natural products, like phenolic compounds, exhibit several bioactivities, it is urgent to test them and evaluate their inhibition of each clinical indication of Alzheimer’s disease. If phenolic compounds target more than one Alzheimer’s disease pathogenic mechanism (multi-target drug ligands), they will have the potential of becoming a leading Alzheimer’s disease treatment. Thus, this review analyzes, for each Alzheimer’s disease clinical indication, the scaffolds of several phenolic compounds leading to the highest activity with the objective to find phenolic compounds active against all the clinical indications. It was concluded that compounds presenting scaffolds like rugosin E or isocorilagin show potential in combating Alzheimer’s disease.