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The Establishment of the Early Intervention Program for Patients With Schizophrenia

NCT00172770 · Status: UNKNOWN · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 20

Last updated 2005-12-21

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness, which has a prodromal phase of 1-2 years prior to the onset of the illness. During the prodromal phase, patients might show maladaptation and/or poor social functioning. However, these early symptom of schizophrenia might be overlooked by patients and their families. At that period, patients might strive to improve their social interactions and social functioning. However, the efforts might further create their stress level on everyday life, which can actually accelerate the illness onset of schizophrenia. In other words, the efforts would worsen the pathophysiologic changes in the brain, which can result in the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

Previous researches found that the critical period for treatment of schizophrenia is the early phase of illness onset, especially the first two or three years. Delay treatment would worsen the illness. To this extent, early treatment would bring to a better prognosis as well as minimize the costs of individuals, families and society. In other words, early interventions not only can prevent relapse, it also can benefit patients' psychosocial adjustments. However, researches found that the average duration of untreated psychosis is 25.2 months in Taiwan, which indicates the phenomena of delay treatment and this trend might result in missing the critical treatment period.

This is a two years study aiming to establish an early intervention program for patients with schizophrenia. In the first year, it aims to understand the phenomena of psychiatric care services utilization for patients with schizophrenia, special emphasis will be on the delay treatment and pluralistic health seeking process. In the second year, it aims to establish an early intervention program. The results of this research would contribute to in-service trainings, service providing, and policy making of psychiatric services.

Conditions

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Department of Health, Executive Yuan, R.O.C. (Taiwan)

    collaborator OTHER_GOV

  • National Taiwan University Hospital

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Ping-Chuan Hsiung, Ph.D · Department of Nursing, National Taiwan University

Eligibility

Min Age
0 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2004-08-31
Completion
2006-07-31

Countries

  • Taiwan

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT00172770 on ClinicalTrials.gov