ABSTRACT

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, usually associated with old age. With the increasing geriatric population throughout the world, it will pose a great socio-economic burden on the healthcare system and the caregivers. The clinically approved drugs for management of this disease include cholinesterase inhibitors and memantine. But these drugs modulate only the symptoms of this disease rather than addressing the underlying pathology. Therefore, there is an urgent need to discover new therapeutic agents which, coupled with effective diagnostics, can prove effective in therapeutic management of this disease. Phosphodiesterase inhibitors represent an emerging class of drugs with several isoforms reported to play a crucial role in the pathology of this disease. This review discusses various phosphodiesterase inhibitors which are in preclinical and clinical studies along with physicochemical properties that impact CNS penetration and subsequent efficacy.