En kur for schizofreni?

Forskere i USA mener de nå har funnet en bedre løsning på problemet med å medisinere schizofreni. Dette er en vanskelig lidelse å medisinere effektivt. Dagens løsninger er basert på dopaminets rolle i hjernen. Den nye løsningen retter seg i stedet mot glutaminets rolle.

Så langt er resultatene fremragende, melder New York Times. Men det er fremdeles en del tester igjen før et eventuelt nytt legemiddel kommer på markedet. Slik er det. Slike tester tar lang tid, og bør ta det.

Her er utdrag av artikkelen i New York Times:

Daring to Think Differently About Schizophrenia

For Darryle D. Schoepp, that moment came one evening in October 2006, while he was seated at his desk in Indianapolis.

At the time, he was overseeing early-stage neuroscience research at Eli Lilly & Company and colleagues had just given him the results from a human trial of a new schizophrenia drug that worked differently than all other treatments. From the start, their work had been a long shot. Schizophrenia is notoriously difficult to treat, and Lilly’s drug — known only as LY2140023 — relied on a promising but unproved theory about how to combat the disorder.

When Dr. Schoepp saw the results, he leapt up in excitement. The drug had reduced schizophrenic symptoms, validating the efforts of hundreds of scientists, inside and outside of Lilly, who had labored together for almost two decades trying to unravel the disorder’s biological underpinnings.

The trial results were a major breakthrough in neuroscience, says Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. For 50 years, all medicines for the disease had worked the same way — until Dr. Schoepp and other scientists took a different path.

“This drug really looks like it’s quite a different animal,” Dr. Insel says. “This is actually pretty innovative.”

Dr. Schoepp and other scientists had focused their attention on the way that glutamate, a powerful neurotransmitter, tied together the brain’s most complex circuits. Every other schizophrenia drug now on the market aims at a different neurotransmitter, dopamine.