With an already prolific 40-plus-year career in medicine and academics, Sheldon Preskorn, M.D., a psychiatry professor with the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at KU School of Medicine-Wichita, continues to accrue recognition.

In October, Preskorn was honored as the Educator of the Year during an annual conference sponsored by Psychiatric Times, considered a go-to publication for medical health care physicians and professionals. Preskorn was also a presenter at the conference, sharing information about major depressive disorder treatment.

Preskorn was recognized for his longtime work in psychopharmacology, the study of using medication to treat the mental health of patients. Preskorn, who joined the KU School of Medicine-Wichita faculty in 1985, has been a principal investigator on nearly every psychiatric medication on the market today, ranging from “first time in humans” to Phase 3 trials. Preskorn now provides consulting services to drug, device and diagnostic companies.

His insider knowledge on how drugs make their way from the discovery laboratories into patients’ medicine cabinets plus his longtime interest in pharmacology, psychiatry and pathology have resulted in Preskorn being a fount of knowledge for residents at KU School of Medicine-Wichita about drug treatments in and beyond psychiatry. Recently, for example, he reviewed with residents the neurobiology of sleep and treatments available for sleep disorders.

“When I started out after medical school, I actually went into anatomical pathology, mainly focusing on neuropathology, because I wanted to understand the brain and I also wanted to understand disease processes,” said Preskorn, who graduated from KU School of Medicine in Kansas City in 1974.

In addition to that postgraduate training, he completed his psychiatry residency and worked in the neuroscience department lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Before joining the faculty of KU School of Medicine-Wichita, Preskorn was in KU School of Medicine-Kansas City’s departments of psychiatry and pharmacology with an emphasis on clinical pharmacology.

At another conference in October — this one a major scientific conference for drug researchers and professionals in academe and commercial and government labs — Preskorn gave a keynote address about COVID-19 patients being at higher risk for drug-to-drug interactions (DDIs). The virtual Applied Pharmaceuticals Analysis conference was organized by the nonprofit Boston Society.

Because people at higher risk for getting COVID-19 often have other chronic health conditions for which they take medication, they are at higher risk for having DDIs with COVID-19 treatments, Preskorn said in the presentation. Health care providers have to remain aware of that to determine how and if they can lower the risk of unplanned and adverse DDIs.

As more prescription drugs are approved and as America’s population ages, the risk of DDIs increases. For example, 20% of Americans over the age of 65 take five or more prescription drugs.

“If you take the number of drugs we have on the market, you can prescribe up to 50 quadrillion different combinations of five drugs to just one person,” Preskorn said. “The greatest safeguard against DDIs is for physicians to become more astute about the drugs they prescribe and to use software programs that can help manage and determine DDIs.”

Admittedly, this number has not been adjusted to take into account that a patient is unlikely to be on five drugs from the same pharmacological class. Nevertheless, it emphasizes that it remains the knowledgeable and conscientious prescriber coupled with the pharmacist armed with software programs who remain the main safeguard against unplanned and adverse DDIs, particularly in high-risk patients.

It is these intriguing and important facts that keep Preskorn active in the field.

Above, left: Dr. Sheldon Preskorn was invited by the Chinese government in September 2010 to give a presentation for a special lecture to attendees from all major Chinese medical schools. (File photo)