Pharmacological aspects of galantamine for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease

Galantamine is a natural product belonging to the isoquinoline alkaloid family of compounds. It was first discovered and isolated in the 1950s from Galanthus nivalis (common snowdrop) and Galanthus woronowii (Caucasian snowdrop), members of the Amaryllidaceae family (Marco and do Carmo Carreiras, 2006). Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who first identified the disease in 1906. AD slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and is the most frequently diagnosed age-related neurodegenerative disorder (Prvulovic et al., 2010). Galantamine is an acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitor and one of the most promising drugs available for the treatment of AD and various other memory impairments (Scott and Goa, 2000; Ago et al., 2011). Synthetic galantamine was first approved for the treatment of AD in Sweden in 2000 and was subsequently approved in the European Union and the United States (Heinrich and Lee Teoh, 2004). In the present report, we reviewed the most recent studies on the pharmacological activity of galantamine (Table 1).