O41 Traditional Chinese medicine Liuwei Dihuang decoction and its new formula, LW-AFC, as promising therapies against Alzheimer’s disease: Pharmacological actions and mechanisms

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia that affects millions of elderly people worldwide. The currently available therapies have limited efficacy. Liuwei Dihuang decoction (LW), a classical traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formula, has long been used to treat various diseases, including dementia. A large number of pharmacological studies have shown that LW has beneficial effects on AD. LW-AFC is a new formula consisting of the main active components prepared from LW. In this study, we found that administration of LW-AFC significantly improved behavioural performances in spontaneous locomotor activity, object recognition memory, spatial learning and memory, passive and active avoidance impairment in some AD mouse models, such as SAMP8 and APP/PS1 transgenic mice. Meanwhile, the impairments of long-term potentiation (LTP) were significantly ameliorated by LW-AFC administration in SAMP8 mice, as well as in the corticosterone-induced LTP inhibition mouse model. These effects were companied by an alleviation in neuron loss in the hippocampus, suppression of A-beta deposition in the brain, and a reduction in the concentration of Abeta42 in the hippocampus and plasma of APP/PS1 mice. The restoring and correcting of imbalance in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axes, the disorder of lymphocyte subsets, and the abnormalities in cytokine production were also observed in LW-AFC treated SAMP8 and APP/PS1 mice. These findings indicated that LW-AFC ameliorated the behavioural and pathological deterioration of AD mice via the restoration of the NIM network in a holistic way, suggesting that LW-AFC might be a promising therapy for AD.