Upcoming Schizophrenia Insights at APA Annual Meeting With Dr Citrome

Psych Congress Network Schizophrenia Section Editor, Leslie Citrome, MD, MPH, shares "what to expect" at this year's American Psychiatric Association 2022 Annual Meeting in the schizophrenia space. Dr Citrome, who is also a consultant to the Psych Congress annual meeting, will be participating in the exhibit hall and invites you to stop by.

Watch Part 2, with more insights and previews, here!

Read the transcript:

Hello, I'm Dr Leslie Citrome, clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) annual meeting to be held shortly in Louisiana.

This is going to be an opportunity for many of us to see each other after a long time away because of the pandemic. I look forward to hearing more about new events and research regarding schizophrenia. Schizophrenia's been a topic of interest my entire career both as a clinician and researcher.

When we come into the APA, we're going to be overwhelmed with a number of offerings regarding various things that sound interesting. We'll also be told about events on the exhibit hall floor regarding new products, as well as information about the disease state. I'll be participating in one of them just to mention regarding myth busting and long-acting injectable (LAI) antipsychotic use and I hope to see you there.

I'm also quite keen on hearing about in the scientific sessions issues regarding schizophrenia. On Saturday, May 21st, there is a session called the “Accelerating Medicine's Partnership in Schizophrenia Big Data for Psychosis Prediction.”

This sounds pretty cool here. The chair is Dr Morris, and presenting are Dr Woods and McGorry and Kahn, very well-known people in the schizophrenia world. And here, there's going to be discussion about how we can leverage different sources of data to really improve on what we can offer patients. So, that's pretty cool.

Sunday, May 22nd will be “Clozapine 101,” and the chair of that session is Dr Coates and we're going to hear there, if you attend, how to incorporate a potentially lifesaving tool into your armamentarium.

Now, clozapine's relatively underutilized, and we're worried about it because of its tolerability profile. You'll hear from the presenters about how they manage the safety tolerability issues of Clozapine in their real world settings and treating patients with schizophrenia. And it's quite doable, and I'm sure it's a wonderful opportunity to ask questions from these very seasoned clinicians.

There's also going to be some discussion about the ascendants of the glutimartigic synapse and the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, where Dr. Coyle is presenting. He's one of the pioneers in the idea that glutimartigic signaling and particularly the NMDA receptor complex is key in understanding schizophrenia. This is something that is gaining traction and it's gaining some attention in terms of drug development.

Now, so far, we've had no commercialized agents that directly target the NMDA receptor to improve the symptoms of schizophrenia, but there's one that is in phase three of clinical trial development and that is looking at cognition using glycine transporter inhibitor. We've heard this story before, and I think we're looking forward to perhaps better success this time in phase 3.

Leslie Citrome, MD, MPH, is clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, and has a private practice in Pomona, New York. He graduated from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal, Canada and completed a Residency and Chief Residency in Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. He also went on to complete a Masters in Public Health at Columbia University.