scholarly journals PI3K/AKT Signal Pathway: A Target of Natural Products in the Prevention and Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui-Zhi Long ◽  
Yan Cheng ◽  
Zi-Wei Zhou ◽  
Hong-Yu Luo ◽  
Dan-Dan Wen ◽  
...  

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are two typical neurodegenerative diseases that increased with aging. With the emergence of aging population, the health problem and economic burden caused by the two diseases also increase. Phosphatidylinositol 3-kinases/protein kinase B (PI3K/AKT) signaling pathway regulates signal transduction and biological processes such as cell proliferation, apoptosis and metabolism. According to reports, it regulates neurotoxicity and mediates the survival of neurons through different substrates such as forkhead box protein Os (FoxOs), glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β), and caspase-9. Accumulating evidences indicate that some natural products can play a neuroprotective role by activating PI3K/AKT pathway, providing an effective resource for the discovery of potential therapeutic drugs. This article reviews the relationship between AKT signaling pathway and AD and PD, and discusses the potential natural products based on the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway to treat two diseases in recent years, hoping to provide guidance and reference for this field. Further development of Chinese herbal medicine is needed to treat these two diseases.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 2332-2339

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a leading cause of dementia, remained incurable, despite many advances in our knowledge about AD pathogenesis, underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Transcriptome analysis showed efficiency in exploring these mechanisms; however, data are generated at a higher pace than interpreted and are almost inconsistent. Therefore we performed this meta-analysis to extract new knowledge from existing data and find the mechanisms involved in AD. Five temporal cortex transcriptomics datasets from 187 AD patients and 167 healthy controls were analyzed. Our analysis showed that the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway is significantly impaired in AD brains and was common among all datasets. Moreover, miRs targeting genes involved in the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway were identified. In conclusion, our results highlight the impaired PI3K-Akt signaling pathway in AD and suggested related miRs as the potential targets for early treatment and diagnosis of AD.


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