Current Pharmacological Trials Addressing Unmet Needs of Patients with Schizophrenia

Dear Colleagues,

New pharmacological targets are addressing social functioning, the main unmet need in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia. Antipsychotics have exhibited high efficacy in recent years in managing psychotic and to some extent negative and even less cognitive symptoms, but this is not enough to cure patients with schizophrenia and free from the everyday burden their caregivers. Most of the newly developed compounds target the main consequence of the disease: limited socialization capacity.

Age-related problems in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia are the next unmet need. Today, psychiatrists have better skills to diagnose schizophrenia early in childhood and to provide patients with better help throughout their life. Due to this, psychiatrists face new challenges in terms of adjusting treatment to age-related problems and dealing with comorbid conditions, e.g., aging patients with schizophrenia and dementia. New pharmacological agents can solve a number of these problems.

What can we do with pregnant patients with acute schizophrenia? If there is a good treatment response, and the patient restores their social function, the possibility of pregnancy becomes realistic. However, safer new agents cannot be used in this category of patients due to regulatory restrictions.

In this Special Issue, the following topics will be addressed:

• new knowledge regarding the origin of schizophrenic symptoms;
• new targets for psychopharmacological agents;
• data on the role of oxidative stress, imbalance of the immune system, and inflammation and distortion of microbiota in the origin of schizophrenia.

You may choose our Joint Special Issue in Psych.

Dr. Margarita A. Morozova
Dr. Denis Burminskiy
Guest Editors

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• schizophrenia
• treatment
• new pharmacological targets
• social functioning