New schizophrenia treatment canceled due to poor results

The development of a drug called pomaglumetad methionil, also known as mGlu2/3, has been discontinued in light of an unsatisfactory performance in its second phase of testing, according to PsychCentral. Schizophrenics still have the option to buy Zyprexa from a Canadian internet pharmacy to help control their condition.

“I’m disappointed in what these results mean for patients with schizophrenia who still are searching for options to treat this terrible illness. While there are many challenges in this complex field of research, neuroscience remains a core focus at Lilly,” said Jan Lundberg, executive vice president of science and technology and president of Lilly Research Laboratories, as quoted by the news source.

The PsychCentral article continues to explain that drugs are often canceled when researchers decide the proposed treatments won't receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), due to a lack of effectiveness or potential for side effects. The news source also states that Lilly Research Laboratories gave up on two other new medications this month, one of which would have treated Alzheimer's had it been successful.

Likelihood of schizophrenia and autism connected to age of parent

In other news pertaining to the delusion and paranoia-inducing mental disorder, a research paper recently published in the science journal Nature reports that men who father a child during their 40s or later have a greater chance of having autistic or schizophrenic offspring. This is due to age increasing the risk of random mutations in the father's DNA, according to the research.

Icelandic scientists analyzed blood samples from almost 80 mentally healthy parents who had autistic or schizophrenic children, as well as blood samples from their sons or daughters. The father's age, they say, was the only significant, consistent factor they could find. 

“It is absolutely stunning that the father’s age accounted for all this added risk, given the possibility of environmental factors and the diversity of the population. And it’s stunning that so little is contributed by the age of the mother,” said Dr. Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of Decode and the study’s senior author, quoted by the New York Times.

Another researcher Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, noted that most of the DNA mutations older fathers can pass down are harmless, and men in their 50s, more often than not, father children with no psychological disorders.