Muscarinic receptors in schizophrenia

Abstract

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the muscarinic receptors may present a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of schizophrenia. This argument is supported by studies using postmortem CNS tissue and a neuroimaging study that have shown there are regionally specific decreases in selective muscarinic receptors in the CNS of subjects with schizophrenia. This raises the possibility that drugs specific to individual muscarinic receptors could have beneficial effects on the symptoms of schizophrenia, a posit supported by studies in receptor knockout/knockdown mice where it has been shown that specific behaviours affected by schizophrenia are also abnormal in mice lacking a sing..