Neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), Alzheimer’s
disease (AD), Huntington’s disease (HD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are
incurable pathologies with huge social and economic impacts closely related to the
increasing of life expectancy in modern times. Although the clinical and
neuropathological aspects of these debilitating disorders are distinct, they have a unified
feature that is the characteristic pattern of neurodegeneration in anatomically or
functionally related regions. All of them remain uncured and presently available
treatments are only symptomatic and do not alter the course or progression of the
underlying diseases. In this context, the search for new effective chemical entities,
capable to act in diverse biochemical targets, with new mechanisms of action and low
toxicity stands as a challenge to research groups and Pharmaceutical Industry. This
scenery has been promising to the reemerging of modern natural products chemistry to
provide active, sophisticated and complex new lead molecules to drug discovery and
development. In this publication, we discuss some of the main contributions of the
natural products chemistry including more than thirty plant species and the main
pharmacological advances for the discovery of active constituents in plants, herbs and
extracts prescribed by Traditional Medicine practices to treat senile neurodegenerative
disorders, especially for AD and PD, in the period after the 2000s. Many of the recent
reported data are resultant of studies carried out during the 90s decade, and the most
important contributions are also cited, as well as the main advances in the
pharmacological basis to understand the mechanisms of action and to explain the effects
of some of these active compounds in the improvement on memory and cognition, in
neurovascular function, and as neuroprotective agents.
Keywords: Neurodegenerative disorders, biodiversity, natural products,
Alzheimer, Parkinson, drug discovery, medicinal chemistry.
