The importance of ontogenetic community and morphological-functional similarity of the hippocampus and buccal epithelium for the development of minimally invasive methods for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease (literature review)

Background. Alzheimer's disease is a socially significant problem, since it is one of the leading causes of patients’ disability, which significantly reduces their quality of life. There is a need to find a diagnostic method that would allow identifying brain morphological disorders at pre-dementia stages of the disease. High involvement of hippocampal struc-tures in Alzheimer's pathology determines the need to study it for the purpose of early neurodegenerative diseases. An urgent scientific task is to search for biological tissue obtained minimally invasively, having an embryonic community with the hippocampus, which determines the structural similarity of cells in health and degeneration. Buccal epithelial tissue and the central nervous system have an ectodermal origin in embryogenesis, which allows considering histological examination of the buccal epithelium as a non-invasive method for studying degenerative processes in the central nerv-ous system. Objective: to describe ontogenetic community and morphofunctional similarity of the hippocampal and buccal epithelium tissues, their participation in the genesis of neurodegenerative diseases for the further development of minimally invasive methods for diagnosing AD. Materials and Methods: a descriptive review of scientific papers from the PubMed text database and the eLibrary scientific electronic library with the use of keywords. A step-by-step selec-tion of information was carried out in December 2024. The search volume was not limited by the year of the publication. In accordance with the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 13 articles published from 2012 to 2024 were selected for this review. Results and Conclusions. The cellular structure of BE is subject to age-related changes; under conditions of neurodegeneration, the volume of signs of “aging” in the cellular structures of BE increases. Buccal epithelium is a promising peripheral tissue for identifying potential markers of AD, since, like brain cells, it originates from differentiat-ed ectodermal tissue. The method for obtaining buccal epithelial cells is low-traumatizing, fast and cost-effective. In the diagnostic process, it is necessary to take into account the exceptional importance of parallel assessment of the patient's cognitive functions and the results of neuroimaging studies.