Anyone else think they’ll find a cure for Alzheimer’s before Schizophrenia? I’m thinking they’ll cure Alzheimer’s disease in the next 10-20 years. I don’t think we’ll be cured for a while. They’ll definitely have some better medications for us though. I also think any progress towards dementia will help us schizophrenics too. Thanks.
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I don’t know to be honest. I just try to work on myself until a cure is found cos it’s not good to just give up in hopes for a cure.
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pure wisdom ish! 
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I think there will be a lot of great advances in the next 10 to 20 years
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lol I think it would be good if a cure was round the corner. But we never know when so it’s good to make ourselves as comfortable as we can.
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Ten years ago someone told me there would be better medications today
Still waiting
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I do think they will cure, or at least treat Alzheimer’s as a chronic disease (maintain people at a stable level) before they cure schizophrenia. It looks more biologically simple - obviously it isn’t simple, but in comparison to sz. There are also more researchers and more money being spent.
10-20 years sounds reasonable for a good Alzheimer’s treatment, of course we don’t know what we don’t know.
I think what we’ll see in sz treatment in 10-20 years is a blood based test, possibly combined with brain scans for early diagnosis. It seems that there are certain protiens which are over or under expressed in sz and these can be seen in the blood even before a psychotic break. But to go from early research to a publicly available test will take years.
Right now induced pluripotent stem cells are probably most useful in drug development. It seems they can actually test drugs in a dish for particular genetic mutations and see if they work. This has possibility for drug testing, although just because a drug works in a dish doesn’t mean it can get into the brain when taken orally or that it won’t have serious side effects. But it also opens up possibilities that we may be able to have personalized medicine as doctors will eventually be able to say this drug will work for you, and this one won’t, without having to try it on you. That could happen in practice in the next 10 to 20 years because it is possible in the lab today. We do have genetic tests that are being used by some psychiatrists today, which have some usefulness.
I don’t know when we might see things like stem cell therapies enter clinical trials for sz. When they create stem cells and generate neurons from the tissue of people with sz, these cells have defects. It seems that in order for a stem cell therapy to be helpful, these would need to be corrected. This may be possible through CRISPR. But it isn’t yet, as far as I can tell. Maybe there will be case studies in 10 or 20 years, but who knows.
Right now I think the biggest hurdle is the increased level of placebo response in drug trials. This has been documented, and has killed more than a few new drug prospects recently. Possibly, better knowledge of genetics will allow drug companies to screen participants so that only people who are biologically capable of responding to their drug can participate.
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