Dr. Thomas McGlashan, a professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and principal investigator of this new research, studied young people who had “not lost their grip on reality but knew that their thinking was not right.”
McGlashan noted that he hoped to identify those prone towards schizophrenia before they suffered what he calls their “first break”, characterized by hallucinations and delusions.
His study, financed by the National Institute of Mental Health and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, focused on 60 young people with altered thinking, assigning them either a placebo or the widely-used schizophrenia drug Olanzapine.
The results showed that 8 percent of those on placebo developed psychosis--delusional thinking or hallucinations--compared with 16 percent of those taking Olanzapine, manufactured by Eli Lilly.
But the study, which advocates early drug treatment of youngsters who exhibit signs of the disease, has raised lots of eyebrows among the medical community. “While it would be great to find people at risk, you don't want to put people on these medicines if they don't need to be," said Dr. Daniel Weinberger, director of genes, cognition and psychosis at the National Institute of Mental Health.
The anti-psychotic medicines used to treat schizophrenics have been linked to a number of serious side affects, such as weight gain, type-2 diabetes, and troubling cognitive problems. "There is a lot of concern in the field," Weinberger said.
