VIDEO: Emerging therapies in tardive dyskinesia

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify iwaters@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

There's a few emerging therapies for the treatment of tardive dyskinesia, both in terms of oral medications, as well as interventions. The most recent additions to the armamentarium of tardive dyskinesia is the approval, back in 2017, of both Valbenazine and Deutetrabenazine. Both of which are VMAT2 inhibitors. In a way, they're new versions of Tetrabenazine, which was the VMAT2 inhibitor that was available prior to the approval of these two agents. And since, it's become really a go-to medication that we use frequently for the treatment of TD. You know, the data is very solid supporting its use, and we know that it's both efficacious as well as safe to use these drugs. So that has really been the most recent addition to the armamentarium, as I was mentioning, But, there are other agents in the horizon. Deep brain stimulation, which we've used typically for the treatment of many different movement disorders, including Parkinson's disease, tremor. Dystonia is now being looked at for the treatment of tardive dyskinesia, particularly patients with debilitating tardive dystonia that is refractory to medications or any other kind of intervention. The studies so far are small, but they've definitely shown a signal of improvement and it's not unreasonable, in my opinion, to use deep brain stimulation, sort of in a compassionate use manner, for the treatment of these patients, particularly when they're very debilitated. There's some very interesting data from China looking at magnetic stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation for the treatment of tardive dyskinesia. We'll have to sort of stand by and see if that pans out or not, but that's certainly another interesting sort of minimal modulation approach to the treatment of TD. And there are agents that have been reported, occasionally in the literature, to help with tardive dyskinesias. Including Amantadine, which we've used for treatment of Parkinson's for really decades. Vitamin E, Levetiracetam. Small studies really, data from large randomized controlled trials are slacking, but certainly interesting reports to sort of keep an eye on, and hopefully in the future they will show promising results.