Alterations Of Potassium Channels In Rat Brain With β-amyloid Peptide Impairment And Studies Of Potassium Channel Regulators

Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most common cause of dementia in the elderly, is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by cognitive deterioration as well as behavioral, affective, and psychotic disturbances. Many useful results have been got in the research of AD pathology. Several pathological hypotheses, such as the aggregation of beta-amyloid peptide, neurofibrillary tangles, and loss of the central cholinergic neurons, etc, have also been put forward to explain partly the mechanisms of AD. Because neuronal excitability is directly related with central potassium channel activities, which have been proved to alter greatly in dementia animal model with cholinergic impairment in our previous research, potassium channels are suggested to be one of the important factors in AD pathogenesis.Potassium channels, whose activities are crucial for controlling the neuronal membrane potential and excitability and regulating the synaptic connection of central nervous system, have the largest superfamilies and the most complicated classification by now. Potassium channels are also closely related to kinds of neural physiological and pathological conditions such as learning, memory and brain injury. With the development of molecular biological techniques, various potassium channel subtypes were discovered. Many studies on the different functions and tissue distributions of potassium channel subtypes have been reported. But there is no report about the possible function and expression...