EDITORIAL New Targets of Medical Treatment in Psychiatric Disorders

A broader palette of safe and better-tolerated agents is available for treating people suffering from chronic schizophrenia, depressive disorders, anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorders. However, current medical treatments are still only partially effective, and highly-prevalent psychiatric disorders continue to represent a huge personal and socio-economic burden. Most pharmacological agents sometimes induce a variety of severe movement disorders, including dystonia or dyskinesia, with an acute, subacute or more chronic time course. More extensive cerebral condition, such as the neuroleptic malignant syndrome or the serotonin syndrome may be induced by antipsychotics or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI). Medications commonly involve dopamine receptor blockers, antidepressants and anti-epileptics, among many others. Mechanisms underlying druginduced movement disorders involve blockade, facilitation or imbalance of dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline and cholinergic neurotransmission in the basal ganglia [1]. The traditional and atypical neuroleptics sometimes induce dystonic reactions, akathisia, parkinsonism, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, serotonin syndrome, tremor, hyperkinesia and movement disorders [1]. A better understanding of the impact of these drug-induced adverse effects may provide new strategies to develop novel neuroleptics with less adverse metabolic effects and to develop complementary medical therapies to patients treated with antipsychotic medication [2]. The lack of success in discovering more effective pharmacotherapy has contributed, together with many other factors, to a relative few useful findings on new drug targets for neuropsychiatric disorders.