We Might Be Treating Schizophrenia All Wrong

For more than 70 years, doctors treated the symptoms of schizophrenia—delusions, hallucinations, cognitive impairments—with antipsychotic medications. Prevailing theories suggest that elevated dopamine signaling in the brain leads to schizophrenia, so these antipsychotics provide relief by tempering dopamine activity. Yet, it has never been entirely clear how these drugs quiet dopamine activity. And due to their nature, these drugs impact other parts of the body and foster unwanted side effects including weight gain, constipation, and drowsiness. On top of that, more than nearly a third of patients don’t even respond to two or more common antipsychotic treatments.

What if there was a better way to treat the more than 24 million people around the world with schizophrenia? A new study run by researchers in Japan and published earlier this year in Cell Reports Medicine suggests that for at least a significant portion of patients, the immune system is mistakenly attacking a protein in the brain—which may be the real mechanism giving rise to schizophrenic symptoms in the first place.

This study is the tip of the iceberg too.

“We don’t know what causes schizophrenia,” Roger McIntyre, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Toronto (who was unaffiliated with this work), told The Daily Beast. “Rigorous scientific studies that have been conducted and they have concluded that for some people, some of the symptoms of schizophrenia may be a consequence of a disturbance in the immune inflammatory system.”

This in turn, may open the door to an entirely new way of treating schizophrenia—one that’s unencumbered by the challenges holding back current antipsychotics.

The team behind the new study analyzed blood from about 200 patients with schizophrenia and compared it to blood samples from more than 200 healthy individuals. In about 6 percent of schizophrenia patients, the researchers found elevated levels of an antibody that targeted NCAM1, a protein crucial for cell communication in the brain. None of the healthy individuals enrolled in the study produced this antibody.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-might-be-treating-schizophrenia-all-wrong?ref=home

Holy crap, if this is true, so many lives could be saved!