View clinical trials related to Negative Symptoms.
Filter by:Negative symptoms are core symptoms in schizophrenia which play an important role in clinical outcomes and impede patients to return to society. Anti-psychotic medicines have shown limited effect in improving negative symptoms and cognitive functioning, whereas non-invasive neuromodulations, i.e. , transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), have shown promising potentials. Recently new evidence of brain structural and functional alterations has been provided by neuroimaging studies. Brady RO et al. found cerebellar-prefrontal network connectivity was related to negative symptoms in schizophrenia. It provides clues for developing a new tACS protocol targeting improving negative symptoms, in which dual-channel high-density alternating current stimulations were delivered over both the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and cerebellum simultaneously.
In this randomized double-blind trial, we investigated whether externally induced left-hemispheric frontoparietal theta synchronization by multi-electrode online theta (6Hz) transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) would enhance the influence of a working memory training on negative symptoms of schizophrenia.
This is a 16-week, randomized, double-blind, parallel group, placebo-controlled study comparing adjunctive vortioxetine with identically appearing adjunctive placebo pills in 88 stable patients with a research diagnosis of schizophrenia determined with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM (SCID). Patient randomization will be stratified by illness duration (i.e., </=5 years and >5 years) in order to allow for post-hoc analyses examining whether earlier illness moderates greater negative and /or cognitive symptom reduction in response to vortioxetine.
Negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia (CDS) are core features of schizophrenia. These negative symptoms and cognitive deficits have a devastating impact on the function, employment, and social interactions of patients with schizophrenia. Medications used to treat schizophrenia (e.g. atypical antipsychotics) do not improve negative symptoms or CDS. TC-5619 is being developed for use as an add-on therapy in combination with atypical antipsychotics to treat patients with negative symptoms and CDS.
Negative symptoms in schizophrenia present a challenge to the clinician owing to their poorer response to conventional treatment with antipsychotics. Negative symptoms in schizophrenia may be secondary to psychotic symptoms, depressive symptoms, drug-related side effects or lack of environmental stimulation. Alternately, they may represent core features of the illness, characterized as primary deficit symptoms. Previous studies have suggested that atypical antipsychotics may be beneficial in improving deficit symptoms of schizophrenia. This study aimed at characterizing the nature of improvement of negative symptoms in the early phase (12 weeks) of treatment with the atypical antipsychotic, risperidone. In order to account for factors contributing to improvement in secondary negative symptoms, ratings were carried out of change in positive symptoms, depressive symptoms and drug-related side effects. Further, add-on citalopram or placebo were administered in a double-blind design to study the effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) augmentation of risperidone on negative symptoms. The investigators hypothesized that the improvement in negative symptoms during the initial phase (12 weeks) of treatment with risperidone will be largely accounted for by improvement in secondary negative symptoms, rather than of the primary deficit symptoms.
Dopamine has been closely associated with prefrontal function. The hypothesis that a lower dopaminergic activity is associated with negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction observed in the patients of schizophrenia is of a heuristic value in guiding research in this area. This hypothesis led us to test whether pergolide, a D1/D2 agonist, could improve negative symptoms and cognitive impairments prevailing in most patients with schizophrenia. This double-blind placebo controlled study will investigate the remedial effect of pergolide on negative symptoms and cognitive impairments in schizophrenia.