Electrophysiology and Blood Flow in Patients With Schizophrenia and Their Siblings

Completed

Conditions studied: Healthy, Schizophrenia

In brief

This study will explore how the brain works during memory testing in an effort to understand why some patients with schizophrenia have memory difficulties. Patients with schizophrenia and their unaffected family members are eligible for this study. Studying family members may help identify the genes related to the memory deficit in schizophrenia. Normal volunteers will also be studied. Normal volunteers, patients with schizophrenia, and their family members interested in participating in this study will be screened with a complete medical examination and psychiatric assessment, and performance of simple tasks. Study participants will be shown numbers on a screen and asked to recall them after a brief period. This will be done during electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, in which electrodes attached to the scalp measure the brain s electrical activity. The same test will be repeated while the patient has magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. The combined MRI and EEG testing will permit better localization of the brain s electrical activity. ...

Key facts

Study ID

NCT00001921

Run by

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

People needed

1386

Starts

1999-09-21

Expected to finish

2018-06-08

Last updated by the study team

2019-12-17

Who can join

Age: 18 and older, up to 55. Sex: any. Healthy volunteers: accepted.

You may not qualify if…

• Controls and patients:
• Impaired hearing.
• Pregnancy (only for purpose of MRI procedures under separate protocols)
• Head trauma with loss of consciousness in the last year or any evidence of functional impairment due to and persisting after head trauma. Patients or healthy volunteers with a known risk from exposure to high magnetic fields (e.g. patients with pace makers) and those who have metallic implants (e.g. braces) in the head region (likely to create artifact on the MRI scans) will be excluded from participating in the fMRI studies.
• Patients:
• Coexistence of another major mental illness at the time of the study. If the patients experienced other mental illnesses in the past (e.g. a learning disability or major depression), then this should be judged to be fully recovered.
• Criteria for substance abuse met in the last 6 months.
• Criteria for substance dependence met in the last year. If criteria for dependence were met in the past, then the duration of the disorder was less than 3 years, or not judged to have produced long-term brain changes to allow the patient to be in the study.
• Major concurrent medical illness likely to interfere with the acquisition of the task.
• Concomitant medications which could interfere with performance on the task.
• Presence of dyskinetic movements of the face and tongue (likely to interfere with eyeblink measures), or of gross involuntary movements of the whole body (likely to interfere with positioning in the MRI scanner).

Where it is running

• National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, 9000 Rockville Pike — Bethesda, Maryland, United States

Full record on ClinicalTrials.gov

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