View clinical trials related to Mental Disorders.
Filter by:Patients with mood disorder or psychotic disorder will be given handheld devices with personal health records to educate, monitor and deliver customizable healthcare tools based on their personal needs. The use of technology has great potential to deliver care more effectively and efficiently. No actual information is on the handheld device - it is accessed from a secure site behind hospital firewalls.
Strongest Families (formerly Family Help)is an evidence-based, distance health education model for families who have children with behavioural difficulties. The principal research question is "Does Strongest Families, a 12-week, home-based program of interactive readings, instructional videos, homework projects, and weekly "coaching" telephone calls out perform the care families typically experience when referred to a mental health service?". The investigators hypothesize that children randomized to Strongest Families intervention will show a significantly greater reduction in externalizing behaviour problems than those randomized to a Control (usual care). In addition, parents randomized to Family Help will report a greater improvement in parenting skills and a greater reduction in symptoms of emotional distress (i.e., feeling of anxiety, depression, and stress) than parents in the Control condition. Finally, families randomized to Family Help will use fewer mental health services than Controls.
The purpose of the present study is to evaluate a neuroplasticity-oriented, computer-based cognitive remediation treatment program in patients with bipolar disorder and its effects on cognitive deficits and community functioning compared to an active, computer-based control.
This study is being conducted to assess varenicline and bupropion as aids to smoking cessation treatment in subjects with and without an established diagnosis of major psychiatric disorder and to characterize the neuropsychiatric safety profile (pre-specified adverse events (AEs) in both of these populations).
The investigators propose using DaTscan in patients with REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Parkinson's disease (PD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), Alzheimer's disease (AD), and other neurodegenerative syndromes and disorders, to test several hypotheses - some confirmatory, and some novel. Such use will provide new data on the potential clinical and research utility of DaTscan in neurodegenerative diseases. The findings on DaTscan will be correlated with clinical diagnoses and other multimodal imaging studies (e.g., MRI, MRS, FDG-PET, and amyloid-PET) to enhance our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases.
In the Bergen Psychosis Project 2 the antipsychotic drugs aripiprazole, amisulpride, and olanzapine will be compared head-to-head in patients with schizophrenia and related psychoses and followed for 12 months. The study is independent of the pharmaceutical industry, and in accordance with a pragmatic design a clinically relevant sample will be included with as few exclusion criteria as possible. The patients will be assessed repeatedly with regards to symptoms, side effects, and cognitive functioning, as well as laboratory parameters. The study hypothesis is that clinically meaningful differences among the drugs will be disclosed in a pragmatic design.
Multi-element interventions for first-episode psychosis (FEP) are promising but have mostly been conducted on non epidemiologically representative samples in experimental settings, raising the risk thereby of underestimating the complexities involved in treating onset psychosis in "real world" services. The PIANO Trial (Psychosis early Intervention and Assessment of Needs and Outcome) is part of a more broad-based research program (Genetics, Endophenotype and Treatment: Understanding early Psychosis - GET UP) and aims to: 1) test, at 9 months, the effectiveness, as compared to treatment as usual (TAU) of multi-component psychosocial intervention on a large epidemiologically-based cohort of FEP patients and their family members recruited from a 10 million inhabitant catchment area; 2) identify barriers that may hinder its feasibility and patient/family conditions that can render this type of treatment ineffective or inappropriate; 3) identify clinical, psychological, and environmental and service predictors of treatment effectiveness in FEP. Study participants will be recruited from Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) operating for the Italian National Health Service and located in several Northern and Central Regions of Italy. The GET UP PIANO Trial has a pragmatic cluster randomized controlled design, which is considered the gold standard approach for trials that evaluate complex interventions implemented at the institutional level, with the aim of improving health. The assignment units (clusters) are the CMHCs, and the units of observation and analysis are the Centers' patients and their family members. Patients in the experimental group will receive TAU plus: (a) Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) sessions, (b) psycho-educational sessions for family members, and c) a case manager, to serve as the patient's referent. Patient enrollment will take place over a 1 year interval, after a 3 month-long piloting. The fidelity of the experimental interventions and the characteristics of TAU will be regularly monitored. Several psychopathological, psychological, functioning and service use variables will be assessed at baseline and 9 month follow-up by independent evaluators. Assuming an expected incidence rate of 17/100.000 per year for functional psychoses (as previously estimated in Italy), the investigators expect to recruit about 800 patients, and 600 relatives. Assuming an attrition rate of about 50%, the size of the trial would detect at 9 months a difference in terms of primary outcome from 25% for the TAU arm to 10% for the intervention arm, with a power of 80%.
A major goal for the Department of Veterans Affairs is to end Veteran homelessness by 2015. The VA's largest homelessness initiative is the joint Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) Supportive Housing program (HUD-VASH), which has been expanded greatly over recent years via the allocation of 30,000 Housing First vouchers between 2008 and 2010 and increased funding to hire 1,000 new program case managers. However, recent expansion has resulted in a number of implementation challenges including delays in the distribution of housing vouchers and dropout among program participants (25% of those housed in HUD-VASH drop out within a year). Much of this dropout can be attributed to untreated issues facing many Veterans enrolled in HUD-VASH. The most common among these untreated issues are mental health and substance use disorders. The presence of these disorders is due in large part to the fact that much of HUD-VASH case management focuses on housing placement and maintenance, with limited attention to mental health, substance abuse, and other related psychosocial issues, which when left untreated, negatively impacts voucher distribution and housing stability. This project will test an implementation model-Getting To Outcomes (GTO)-designed to assist in the delivery of an intervention for Veterans with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders (MISSION-Vet) in the HUD-VASH program. The proposed study will compare implementation of MISSION-Vet currently being planned through VA Office of Patient Care Services to an enhanced approach using the GTO model. Thus, this project can contribute to ending all Veteran homelessness by 2015, a pledge made by President Obama.
The overall goal of the present study is to determine whether Omega-3 Fatty Acids potentially prevent onset of psychosis and improve clinical symptoms and functional outcome in youth and young adults at elevated clinical risk for schizophrenia and related disorders. The specific aims are: (1) To determine whether the rate of progression to psychosis is lower during six months of treatment with Omega-3 Fatty Acids compared to six months of treatment with placebo, (2) To determine whether Omega-3 Fatty Acids are more efficacious than placebo for prodromal symptoms, negative symptoms, and functioning, (3) To assess the safety and tolerability of Omega-3 Fatty Acids in this population, and (4) To conduct analyses of neuroimaging, neurocognitive, electrophysiological and other ancillary data to explore mechanistic explanations for the hypothesized benefits of Omega-3 Fatty Acids on clinical and functional outcomes (e.g., increases in white matter integrity and processing speed).
The acute phase of this study will monitor the response to a combination of an atypical antipsychotic medication olanzapine with an antidepressant medication sertraline in the acute treatment of the disorder. It is predicted that this combination will improve symptoms of psychotic depression and be associated metabolic side effects. Factors that moderate tolerability will be monitored. Improvement in symptoms could take between 4 and 12 weeks, followed by a period of 8 weeks during which participants will continue to take the same medications to stabilize the remission from symptoms of psychotic depression. The maintenance phase will be a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of olanzapine for a period of up to 36 weeks to test whether continuing this combination decreases the risk of relapse and whether discontinuing the combination leads to improvement in metabolic measures. Subjects who complete the acute phase will be asked to consent separately to the randomized maintenance phase.