Can schizophrenia be prevented?
That’s what investigators are hoping to find out, according to scientists attending the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) in Orlando, Florida. The quest for prevention of this serious mental disorder has been hampered by the fact that the underlying biology is not yet well understood, but a collaboration between scientists at Boehringer Ingelheim and the University of Zurich has yielded new insights that may help catapult such research forward.
In a poster presented at the 58th annual ACNP meeting, scientists presented results from a neurodevelopmental model in rodents that sheds new light on the possibility of prevention of schizophrenia. The model is based on prenatal exposure in pregnant rodents to a viral insult that disrupts neuronal development in the fetus and induces a number of behavioral abnormalities in the adult offspring, including deficits in social behavior, cognition, sensorimotor processing and dopaminergic dysfunctions - deficits that mimic the impairments seen in persons living with schizophrenia.
Scientists gave an experimental compound, BI 409306, during the adolescent period of the animals to evaluate the drugs’ ability to prevent the adult emergence of behavioral deficits. In the first findings of these kind, the treatment given only during the adolescent phase of the animals’ growth prevented the deficits seen in the untreated adult animals.
Dr. Scott Woods, Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University stated “This important preclinical study takes us a big step closer to phase-specific treatments for early psychosis and to the ultimate goal of prevention of schizophrenia.“
BI is currently conducting a large multinational phase II study in persons with Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome (people at high risk for the development of schizophrenia) to see if the drug shows similar benefits in the human setting.
Dr. Richard Keefe, Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center noted, “Among the greatest ambitions of psychiatry research, if not all of medicine, is to prevent the suffering caused by the onset of schizophrenia symptoms. This innovative study provides clear results that brain mechanisms associated with psychosis onset can be interrupted. Parallel results in ongoing human trials would provide significant evidence that psychosis can be prevented, which would be a truly remarkable achievement and welcome news for those with schizophrenia and their families.”