• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.194-202
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• 2010

Alzheimer's disease(AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder and constitutes about two thirds of dementia. Despite a lot of effort to find drugs for AD worldwide, an efficient medicine that can cure AD has not come yet, which is due to the complicated pathogenic pathways and progressively degenerative properties of AD. In its early clinical phase, it is important to find the subtle alterations in synapses responsible for memory because symptoms of AD patients characteristically start with pure impairment of memory. Attempts to find the target synaptic proteins and their pathogenic pathways will be the most powerful alternative strategy for developing AD medicine. Here we review recent progress in deciphering the role of target synaptic proteins related to AD in hippocampal glutamatergic synapses.