Traditional chinese medicine for treatment of dementia

Dementia has been considered as a disease since the seventeenth century in traditional Asian medicine. In the nineteenth century, Wan Qingren described about dementia in a scientific manner at first time in the world. Recently, a traditional herbal medicine yokukansan (YKS) is paid attention to ameliorate behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) without deterioration of extrapyramidal symptoms. YKS improves BPSD and ADL of demented people. Also, it ameliorates hallucination of dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). Pharmacological mechanism of YKS is mainly owing to Uncaria and contained alkaloids related to serotonergic and glutamatergic functions.