Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an intractable
neurodegenerative disease that leads to
dementia, primarily in elderly people. The neurotoxicity of
amyloid-beta (Aβ) and
tau protein has been demonstrated over the last two decades. In line with these findings, several etiological hypotheses of AD have been proposed, including the
amyloid cascade hypothesis, the oxidative stress hypothesis, the inflammatory hypothesis, the
cholinergic hypothesis, et al. In the meantime, great efforts had been made in developing effective drugs for AD. However, the clinical efficacy of the drugs that were approved by the US Food and
Drug Association (FDA) to date were determined only mild/moderate. We recently adopted a
vanadium compound bis(ethylmaltolato)-oxidovanadium (IV) (BEOV), which was originally used for curing
diabetes mellitus (DM), to treat AD in a mouse model. It was shown that BEOV effectively reduced the Aβ level, ameliorated the
inflammation in brains of the AD mice, and improved the spatial learning and memory activities of the AD mice. These finding encouraged us to further examine the mechanisms underlying the
therapeutic effects of BEOV in AD. In this review, we summarized the achievement of
vanadium compounds in medical studies and investigated the prospect of BEOV in AD and DM treatment.