Drugs administered to Alzheimer's disease patients usually aim to increase the levels of acetylcholine or block NMDA receptors, thus producing improvements in cognitive function.

To study the drugs administered to Alzheimer's patients and its possible motor side effect.

Our study included 45 geriatric patients enrolled in a private long-term care institution with mean age of 88.38 ± 0.84 years old, mean weight of en 60.28 ± 2.00 kg with Alzheimer's disease.

Drugs administered to patients with Alzheime's disease were:

donepezil 0.16 mg/kg/day, administered to 53.33% (24) of patients ; rivastigmine patch 9.50 mg/day given to 15.56%(7) of patients and galantamine 0.40 mg/kg/day given to 4.44% (2) of patients.

26.67% (12) of subjects did not received any specific drug for Alzheimer's disease.

Psychomotor agitation and aggressive behavior were observed in 70.83% (17) of patients who received donepezil and in 57.14% (4) patients who had received rivastigmine.

The increase of cholinergic activity due to inhibiton of acetilcholinesterase by donepezil, or due to the activation of cholinergic receptor by rivastigmine in basal ganglia could be related to psychomotor agitation.

This imbalance of cholinergic-dopaminergic activity produced by these drugs may cause motor agitation in a similar way to akathisia induced by neuroleptics.