Schizophrenia News

TORONTO — Genetic testing has become the preferred practice when prescribing psychiatric medications, as these tests reduce the risk for treatment failure and serious side effects, according to a presentation at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting.

Results from a multisite functional MRI study of episodic memory encoding and retrieval indicate that the Relational and Item-Specific Encoding paradigm successfully detects functionally and neuroanatomically specific deficits in relational memory processes among patients with schizophrenia.

Visual hallucinations among children with schizophrenia may be due to delayed development of the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, as results from prospective brain MRI analyses showed genetically influenced and connection-specific developmental abnormalities in the schizophrenia connectome.

The FDA recently approved Rexulti tablets to treat adults with schizophrenia and as an add-on to antidepressant medications for adults with major depressive disorder.

Analyses of MRI scans at 15 centers across the world provide insight into how schizophrenia may develop and respond to treatment, based on brain abnormalities in patients.

Results from an open-label, single-arm prospective study indicate that reducing dosage of antipsychotics is feasible among patients with late-life schizophrenia and can improve extrapyramidal symptoms, hyperprolactinemia and other symptoms related to increases in dopamine D2/3 receptor occupancies.

Long-acting injectable risperidone led to better medication adherence, greater relapse prevention and better psychotic symptom control than oral antipsychotics among patients with recent onset of schizophrenia.

Study findings in Research Involvement and Engagement show discrepancies between what medical research focuses on and what physicians and patients consider to be important therapies.

Never-medicated patients with schizophrenia had faster rates of prefrontal and temporal cortical thinning and striatal hypertrophy than healthy patients, according to study findings in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Results from a case-control longitudinal study indicate progressive brain tissue loss among patients with schizophrenia is associated with cognitive decline early in the illness.