Research by Xiao-Hui Ma showed that paeoniflorin improves morphological changes in AD cell models, such as reducing cell swelling and synaptic shrinkage, this is achieved by lowering Tau phosphorylation levels, increasing AKT and GSK-3β phosphorylation levels, and stabilizing microtubule structures (Ma et al., 2018). The gene discussed is AKT1; the disease is Alzheimer disease.