LITERATURE REVIEW. Watch it on YouTube here.
Professor Vicente Molina performs the review of the following article: Treatment response after 6 and 26 weeks is related to baseline glutamate and GABA levels in antipsychotic-naïve patients with psychosis (Bojesen et al, 2019, Psychological Medicine)
In this article, the authors investigate the possibility of predicting response to antipsychotic treatment on the basis of glutamate and GABA levels in the thalamus and anterior cingulate cortex in previously untreated psychotic patients. For this purpose, they studied 44 of these patients and 34 controls. The patients received aripiprazole for 6 weeks and for the following 20 weeks, the treatment decided by their physician. Basal levels of glutamate in the thalamus and GABA in the cingulum were respectively higher and lower in the patients who did not respond to treatment. Glutamate levels decreased with treatment and were inversely associated with improvement. GABA levels did not change, but were directly associated with the level of clinical improvement. These data support the possibility of finding clusters within the schizophrenia syndrome characterized by primary biological alterations and related to differences in response to treatment.