Mental illness can be quite a burden for anyone affected by one of its many forms. Come mental health diseases such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression devastate lives for new people every day. Among them, schizophrenia is one of the most severe and tends co-occur with depression. It is so devastating because its sufferers lose touch with reality and are likely to attempt suicide. Symptoms of schizophrenia include abnormal thinking, loss of contact with reality, hallucinations, delusions, inability to focus, and more.
Without any way to cure this disease, there are large costs for the person with schizophrenia, their family and society. The person affected loses their ability to enjoy life and to even function, while the family has to sit by and watch them suffer without having any way to help. When someone is disconnected from reality and truly believe that the people on T.V. are plotting to kill them, the only thing one can do it seek out the help of doctors and the most prescribed medications for schizophrenia: antipsychotics.
Antipsychotics are a class of drugs used primarily for treating schizophrenia, and are relatively successfully at eliminating the positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, but they do not help with the negative symptoms: Flat affect, reduced speaking, reduced pleasure and focus. These medications do not cure schizophrenia, they only make life more manageable. They are very helpful, but research is still heavily involved in finding the underlying cause of schizophrenia to possibly prevent it from happening in the first place.
Even thought schizophrenia is typically diagnosed in a person’s early 20s (when they first start having the obvious symptoms: delusions and hallucinations), many researchers believe that schizophrenia is a developmental disorder in which neurons do not correctly associate with each other through their connections of axons and dendrites.
Through much more data and analysis of how antipsychotics work for schizophrenia, a new and exciting mechanism is being explored for the treatment of schizophrenia. Antipsychotics work by blocking the over-activation of dopamine receptor D2. The “Wnt pathway” of neurons is involved in signaling within the cells of people and facilitates normal brain development for people. For people with schizophrenia, it is now thought that this pathway is not activated enough for normal development. Wnt works normally, but its effect on another protein important in neuronal development – GSK3-beta – is reduced because of too much dopamine signaling.
By targeting this pathway, the development of new drugs that treat all the symptoms of schizophrenia could be just around the corner.
Schizophrenia: A New Possible Target for Drug Development
