Abstract:

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that is mostly seen in the elderly population, is clinically characterized by memory and cognitive disorders, and causes irreversible damage to neuron cells. Many reasons such as the unknown causes of the disease, the increase in the number of patients with the increase in life expectancy, the decrease in the quality of life of the disease, and the high cost of treatment have increased the importance of the disease and directed researchers to this field. Although the etiology of the disease is not clarified, some hypotheses try to explain the cause of the disease. These are the cholinergic hypothesis, the amyloid hypothesis, the tau hypothesis, and the oxidative stress hypothesis. The cholinergic hypothesis is the only hypothesis that explains the cause of Alzheimer's disease and is still accepted. According to the cholinergic hypothesis, the decrease in the amount of acetylcholine, an important neurotransmitter that increases learning and cholinergic activity in the nervous system, causes Alzheimer's disease. Acetylcholine is synthesized by the cholineacetyltransferase (ChAT) enzyme in the nervous system, and hydrolyzed by Acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and Butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) enzymes. In this study, the association of AChE and BChE cholinesterase enzymes with Alzheimer's disease was evaluated.