Secrets of neurotransmitters will help schizophrenics

It’s always been an interesting truth of drug treatments for mental health problems that the drugs work, but no one is really sure how they do. Now researchers are a step closer to understanding how antipsychotic drug, prescribed for schizophrenia and dementia, may work.

The multidisciplinary team started with results from a previous study. They knew that two brain receptors form a complex in the area of the brain that malfunctions in schizophrenia. Those brain receptors bind the critical neurotransmitter signals serotonin and glutamate at the outside of the cell.

With this information, the team developed a metric which may show the effectiveness of certain drug treatments and help with the research to find new ones.

The study shows that the connection between the complex of the two receptors and the schizophrenic phenotype is a defect in how the serotonin and glutamate signals get interpreted at the inside of the cell. The process is called signaling. Anti-psychotic drugs overcome this defect.

“Not only have we learned how antipsychotics drugs are effective, but we have also found that the signaling through this receptor complex is critical to how these anti-psychotics work,” said the principal investigator Diomedes Logothetis, PhD, leader in the study of ion channels and cell signaling and chair of the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Physiology and Biophysics.

“We can use the metric we developed to screen new drugs and determine their level of effectiveness,” Logothetis said. “We can also use the metric to assess what combinations of existing drugs will give us the ideal balance between the signaling through the two receptors of the complex.”

Future studies will focus on further identification of protein targets of the signaling pattern of the receptor complex making pharmacological treatment of schizophrenics more efficient.

Source: MedicalNewsToday, Cell