The central nervous system (CNS) is the primary target of neuroinflammation in the pathophysiological event of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Currently, few promising targets have been reported to reduce neuroinflammation and the mechanistic interplay between microglia and neuronal cells in treating AD. The inflammation is the secondary response followed by any injury or infection which confirms that neuroinflammation is the key component in neurodegenerative disorders like AD [1]. Due to the complex and multifactorial etiology of AD pathogenesis [2–4], neuroinflammation plays a fundamental role in etiopathogenesis [5, 6], due to the ability to worsen Aβ and tau protein [7]. Age-dependent pathogenesis is specialized by deteriorating immune system [8] and imbalance of homeostasis [9, 10] which is highly involved in damaging mitochondria [11, 12], impaired autophagy, and mitophagy [13, 14] along with dysregulated ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) unit [15, 16] and activates DNA-damaging response [17, 18]. Modifications in immune biomarkers found in the blood include CRP, TNF-α, IL-6 [19–21], and its soluble receptors of TNF-α [22, 23]. All these receptors and biomarkers together have a crucial role in the development of disease [24, 25, 26]. Glucose metabolism, oxidative stress, and synaptic loss are also triggered by mitochondrial dysfunctioning and contribute to AD pathogenesis [27, 28, 29, 30, 31]
Age progression is the strongest irreversible phenomenon to cause AD [32, 33]. The lack of effective therapies for AD treatment leads to high damage to memory and cognitive activities [34]. AD is the second leading cause of dementia, which will affect 6.7 million people of Americans over the age of 65 in 2023 [35]. The well-known reported mechanistic insights to cause the pathogenesis of AD, are the accumulation of Aβ protein extracellularly and tau protein hyperphosphorylation intracellularly [36–38]. The reported hypothesis of amyloid stat + ed that proteolytic cleavages of amyloid precursor protein by BACE 1 enzyme is the main mechanism of Aβ production and is an effective target for disease modification [39]. The AD-like model established by inducing scopolamine (SCOP) is frequently used to examine cognitive disease. Memory and cognitive function depend heavily on cholinergic activity. According to the cholinergic theory, cognitive impairment in AD patients is mostly caused by the destruction of cholinergic neurons in the brain. Now, it is well established that cholinergic neuronal circuit dysfunction significantly contributes to the cognitive deficits linked to aging and neurodegenerative illnesses like AD [40]. SCOP traditionally blocked working memory-related muscarinic acetylcholine (ACh) receptors [41]. To address memory loss and cognitive impairment in mild and moderate AD, cholinergic agonists, and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) inhibitors have been developed [42]. The process of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, is crucial for tissue homeostasis and health growth [43]. However inappropriate apoptosis has been linked to neurodegenerative conditions like AD [44, 45]. Learning and memory are severely impacted by apoptosis of neuronal tissue [46, 47]. DNA fragmentation is a key component of apoptosis and the assay TUNEL uses terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase to identify it [48]. Trazodone (TRAZ) was docked into the AChE enzyme and its expected binding mode was predicted to understand how it functions as an AChE inhibitor and interacts with the target. The discovery that TRAZ may pass through the active site of the enzyme and attach to the AchE site demonstrates the medication’s potential as a therapeutic lead or molecular probe for the treatment of AD. An effective antidepressant with a long history of usage, TRAZ is especially helpful for treating insomnia and agitation in AD patients. In the 1960s era of TRAZ (FDA-approved) for the treatment of depression, was widely used off-label to treat anxiety, schizophrenia, etc [49–52]. The behavioral and psychological signs and symptoms of AD are lessened by the TRAZ treatment [50, 51]. Thus, we aimed to establish the effects of TRAZ on cognition and to determine whether there was evidence that it could be used in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and whether reduces neuroinflammation or not [52].