14 DAY TRIAL // According to a recent investigation whose findings are detailed in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, there is evidence to suggest that antipsychotic drugs affect the shape and size of the human brain. In a nutshell, they make it shrink.
Researchers in Finland and in the UK say that, as shown by previous investigations, the human brain has a natural tendency to experience a drop in its overall volume as the years go by. This is due to the loss of brain cells and connections.
However, it appears that, in the case of individuals who, for some reason, take antipsychotic drugs for considerable periods of time, this decrease in brain volume occurs at a more rapid pace, i.e. 0.7% per year as compared to 0.5% per year.
This claim that antipsychotic drugs speed up the loss of cells and connections in the brain and therefore foster a more rapid volume decrease is based on data obtained while looking at the medical records of 33 people diagnosed with schizophrenia and 71 control subjects.
The individuals were monitored over a period of time of 9 years, i.e. between the ages of 34 and 43 years old, during which scientists with Finland's University of Oulu and the UK's University of Cambridge kept a close eye on their brain volume loss by means of scans.
As detailed in the journal PLOS ONE, the scientists settled on monitoring the brains of folks in the aforementioned age group due to the fact that brain volume loss typically begins when a person is in their thirties and continues well into old age.
“We all lose some brain tissue as we get older, but people with schizophrenia lose it at a faster rate. We've shown that this loss seems to be linked to the antipsychotic medication people are taking,” Professor Juha Veijola said in a statement.
What's interesting is that, although the schizophrenia patients who were using antipsychotic drugs were found to lose 0.2% more brain volume annually than healthy individuals, this process was not found to affect their cognitive function, Science Daily informs.
“It's important to stress that the loss of brain volume doesn't appear to have any effect on people over the nine year follow-up we conducted, and patients should not stop their medication on the basis of this research,” Dr. Graham Murray commented on these findings.
For the time being, the University of Oulu and University of Cambridge researchers cannot explain how and why antipsychotic drugs act on the brain and encourage volume loss. They wish to further investigate this phenomenon and hope to soon answer these questions.