A new era for schizophrenia drug development - Lessons for the future.

For many patients and their treating clinicians, the pharmacological management of psychotic symptoms centres on trying to find a regime that balances efficacy and quality of life-impairing side effects associated with dopamine antagonism. Recent reports of a positive Phase III study from Karuna Therapeutics indicate that the first primarily non-dopamine-based treatment for schizophrenia may come to market soon with the potential for substantially reduced or differentiated side effects. Against a background of repeated failures, Karuna's success promises a desperately needed new treatment option for patients.

Latent inhibition, aberrant salience, and schizotypy traits in cannabis users.

Aberrant salience processing may underlie the link between cannabis and psychosis, as posited in individuals with schizophrenia or high schizotypy. We investigated the relative effects of cannabis use, schizotypy status, and self-reported aberrant salience experiences on salience processing, measured using a latent inhibition (LI) task (Granger et al., 2016), in a non-clinical population.

Emotional bias training as a treatment for anxiety and depression: evidence from experimental medicine studies in healthy and medicated samples.

Background: Anxiety and depression are leading causes of disability worldwide, yet individuals are often unable to access appropriate treatment. There is a need to develop effective interventions that can be delivered remotely. Previous research has suggested that emotional processing biases are a potential target for intervention, and these may be altered through brief training programs.

Effects of 7.5% Carbon Dioxide and Nicotine Administration on Latent Inhibition.

Stratified medicine approaches have potential to improve the efficacy of drug development for schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, as they have for oncology. Latent inhibition is a candidate biomarker as it demonstrates differential sensitivity to key symptoms and neurobiological abnormalities associated with schizophrenia. The aims of this research were to evaluate whether a novel latent inhibition task that is not confounded by alternative learning effects such as learned irrelevance, is sensitive to (1) an in-direct model relevant to psychosis [using 7.

Postoperative cognitive dysfunction: an acute approach for the development of novel treatments for neuroinflammation.

Inflammation within the central nervous system (CNS; neuroinflammation) is a major contributor to lasting symptoms of traumatic brain injury and stroke, and likely has a casual role Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative conditions. Therapeutic modulation of the immune processes that initiate and maintain neuroinflammation is of growing scientific interest but neuroinflammatory drug development is hampered by limited reliability and availability of neuroimaging or other biomarkers in humans. Better means of establishing drug efficacy on human neuroinflammation would have great value in accelerating the development of neuroinflammatory compounds for many clinical indications.

Test-retest reliability on the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery: Comment on Karlsen et al. (2020).

Test-retest reliability is essential to the development and validation of psychometric tools. Here we respond to the article by Karlsen et al. (Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 2020), reporting test-retest reliability on the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB), with results that are in keeping with prior research on CANTAB and the broader cognitive assessment literature.

The Use of Cognitive Screening in Pharmacotherapy Trials for Cognitive Impairment Associated With Schizophrenia.

There are currently no regulatory approved pharmacological treatments for cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia (CIAS). One possibility is that trial methodology itself is hindering their development. Emerging evidence suggests that patients with schizophrenia may show limited benefit from pro-cognitive interventions if they already exhibit intact cognitive performance, relative to normative thresholds.

Examining the effectiveness of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and stimulant-based medications for cognitive dysfunction in multiple sclerosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

We sought to examine the effectiveness of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs) and stimulant-based medications for improving cognitive performance in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). An electronic database search was conducted on 25th March 2017. Eligible studies were double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials that examined the efficacy of compounds that act primarily as AChEIs or stimulants (administered daily for ≥1 week) on cognitive outcome measures in patients with MS.

Social cognitive dysfunction as a clinical marker: A systematic review of meta-analyses across 30 clinical conditions.

Social cognition includes a range of cognitive processes that help individuals to understand how others think and feel. There is emerging evidence that social cognitive deficits may represent a transdiagnostic issue, potentially serving as a marker of neurological abnormality. We performed an electronic database search in order to identify published, peer-reviewed meta-analyses that compared facial emotion recognition or theory of mind task performance between individuals meeting clinical criteria for a psychiatric, neurological or developmental condition against healthy controls.