A brief review on recent developments in animal models of schizophrenia

Number of patients suffering from schizophrenia is increasing daily, subsequently, increasing the need of proper medication to treat the symptoms and eventually improve the patients′ condition. However, all the progress for designing or discovering medication comes to a standstill, as the symptomatic treatment can only be done in the patients, but performing clinical trials with all the possible candidate drugs in human beings and patients is unethical. Thus, the need arises for proper animal and non-human primate animal models of the disease, which would not only serve the purpose of understanding the disease in a better physiological setting, but also would allow the scientists to focus on developing a therapeutically effective and potent medication for treating this hazardous disease. This brief review article focuses on a few animal models which are generally used for carrying out studies on schizophrenic symptoms in research labs and industry worldwide. The paper also tries to validate the pre-clinically available models based on certain specified criteria like the predictive constructive and face validity. Thus, the paper gives guidance toward the mechanistic and traditional models of schizophrenia applying some of the newer principles and helps researchers in deciding a particular relevant model for their own purpose.

Keywords
Schizophrenia, Animal models, dopamine, glutamate, face validity, predictive validity