Article from Newsweek (March 11, 2002) by Sharon Begley
In an article on schizophrenia they describe how the new drugs can block enough dopamine in a patients brain to ease their symptoms (hearing voices, visions, paranoia) but the drugs don't cause other pathways to block so FEW SIDE EFFECTS! Some of the side effects were impaired movement and cognition so you treat your brain problems only to create new brain problems. The nerves that are effected are in the mesolimbic pathway in the brain. The receptor is only partially mechanically blocked instead of completely blocked like with the old drugs.
The article that also discusses what people do and do not understand about schizophrenia like why one person halucinates about seeing whales on the beach and another sees severed heads and blood. I thought this article was especially interesting since the movie A Beautiful Mind came out and even though we know that there is a genetic component to why people get this disease that is not always the case and there is no hope for a cure in the near future.
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