Schizophrenia, clinical and basic research at NIMH: A 75 Year retrospective.

Objective: In 2024, NIMH is celebrating its 75th anniversary. At the Congressional hearings preceding its initial funding in 1949, witnesses stressed the need for NIMH to carry out clinical and basic research to find the causes and better treatments for severe mental illnesses. Patients with schizophrenia alone were said to occupy one quarter of all hospital beds in the U.

The Underuse of Clozapine and Long-Acting Injectable Antipsychotics.

Schizophrenia is among the most devastating and costly human diseases. The public face of the failure to appropriately treat schizophrenia includes approximately 100,000 homeless individuals with schizophrenia and related psychoses and 200,000 incarcerated individuals with similar diagnoses. Clozapine and long-acting injectable antipsychotics are among the most effective treatments, but both are markedly underused.

Did the human genome project affect research on Schizophrenia?

The Human Genome Project was undertaken primarily to discover genetic causes and better treatments for human diseases. Schizophrenia was targeted since three of the project`s principal architects had a personal interest and also because, based on family, adoption, and twin studies, schizophrenia was widely believed to be a genetic disorder. Extensive studies using linkage analysis, candidate genes, genome wide association studies [GWAS], copy number variants, exome sequencing and other approaches have failed to identify causal genes.

Mercury and Parkinson's Disease: Promising Leads, but Research Is Needed.

Environmental toxicants are thought to play a major role in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease. In reviewing the literature on heavy metals known to be toxicants, we noted several recent studies on mercury suggesting a possible role in the etiology of some cases of this disease. We therefore undertook a review of this association, focusing especially on peer-reviewed articles to avoid the bias inherent in much of the literature regarding mercury.

The NIMH Research Portfolio: An Update.

To examine the funding priorities of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) since 2016 to assess whether NIMH was continuing to prioritize basic research at the expense of clinical research. Six psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, autism) were assessed using 2 publicly available data sources (ClinicalTrials.gov and the National Institutes of Health Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization [RCDC]) to determine the degree of NIMH support for drug trials and research on these disorders in general since 2016.