Media contact: Savannah Koplon
Nina Kraguljac, M.D.Nina Kraguljac, M.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavior Neurobiology in the School of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has received a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the factors of disease progression in psychosis spectrum disorders.
The overall goal of her research is to identify the psychological symptoms that result from these disorders and to develop a drug that is geared toward stopping the progression of the disease.
The most common psychosis spectrum disorders include schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, which affect 1 percent of the population; people are diagnosed in their late teens or early 20s, and for most, the disorders are chronic.
“We only have one class of medications that treat these symptoms, and many people don’t adequately respond to these,” Kraguljac said. “There is a pressing need to understand the causes of these disorders so we can develop new medications that can improve a patient’s life. Investigating factors that contribute to the progress of an illness is an important first step in developing a drug that can stop or reverse the effects.”