What is it about?
Current antipsychotics has been the only pharmacological option of treating symptoms of schizophrenia. However, the treatment is still ineffective in some symptoms for example memory deficits, and also they have a lot of side effects, for example, body weight gain. This study provides a proof of concept that a selective compound which targets muscarinic subtype 1 (M1) as a modulator helps to improve the effectiveness of current antipsychotics to treat symptoms of schizophrenia.
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Why is it important?
This would offer a potential strategy to use this modulator as an adjunct therapy in future by (1) enhance the therapeutic effectiveness of existing antipsychotics and (2) reduce the side-effects produced by the reducing the dosage of existing antipsychotics.
Perspectives
It has been overdue of new discovery of antipsychotics since the 2nd generation, and even the 3rd generation. What has been overlooked is the possibility of a concept of cocktail therapy in the treatment of psychosis. This research opens our mind a lot of possibility of different combinations of drugs which target different inflicted receptors e.g. dopamine and muscarinic, which in turn customise the therapeutic strategery based on symptoms of different patients.
Dr Kwok Ho Christopher Choy
Monash University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Positive Allosteric Modulation of the Muscarinic M1 Receptor Improves Efficacy of Antipsychotics in Mouse Glutamatergic Deficit Models of Behavior, Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, September 2016, American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET),
DOI: 10.1124/jpet.116.235788.
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