The Bioactive Compounds in Medicinal Mushrooms have Potential Protective Effects against Neurodegenerative Diseases.
Neurodegenerative Diseases (NDs) are incurable and debilitating conditions that result in progressive degeneration and/or death of nerve cells. This causes problems with movement (called ataxias), or mental functioning (called dementias), most commonly seen diseases including Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), Parkinson’s Disease (PD), Huntington’s Disease (HD). Currently, there is no effective treatment that can cure NDs, the treatments can only delay the progression of the diseases for a short term. Therefore, the prevention of the NDs occurrence also attracts researchers’ interests. For other types of chronic diseases such as cancer, epidemiological, animal, and in vitro studies show that the consumption of plant source food can potentially reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases attributing to the high anti-oxidative capacity of bioactive compounds in these foods.
In addition to the well-studied polysaccharides such as β-glucan, many small molecules are under investigation for the potential health beneficial effects. The mechanistic studies show that bioactive compounds in various medicinal mushrooms can inhibit activities of neurotransmitter
enzyme, stimulate neurite growth, or play a role on anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative activities. In this review, we summarize the small bioactive molecules in various medicinal mushrooms that potentially carry the function of reducing oxidative stress in neural systems.
The prevention or delay this disease progress becomes an important therapy. The investigations of isolating and identifying the effective bioactive compounds in medicinal mushrooms that potentially prevent the neurodegenerative disease occurrence provide promising scientific data to demonstrate the potential of medicinal mushrooms as a prevention or treatment to the disease. The studies of the bioactive compounds in these mushrooms are still in early investigation stage.
Adv Food Technol Nutr Sci Open J. 2015; 1(2):62-66. doi: 10.17140/AFTNSOJ-1-110