Oxytocin as Adjunctive Treatment of Schizophrenia

Summary

The focus of the current project is to advance our understanding of the effects of oxytocin (OT) on components of social cognition in schizophrenia (SCZ). Despite the rapid increase in our understanding of the role of OT in rodent models of social behavior and an explosion of interest in the prosocial effects of OT in healthy controls, little work has been done to dissect the potential effects of OT on SCZ subjects with social deficits. Social deficits are a crucial aspect of the functional impairments that limit the rehabilitation of patients with SCZ. In particular, SCZ patients with enduring negative symptoms (deficit syndrome, Kirkpatrick et al. 1989) have prominent social deficits as a core feature of this subtype of the illness. Our currently available medications do very little to improve these social deficits. Hence it is of utmost public health importance to address the knowledge gap regarding the potential of OT to improve social function in this illness. Intact social function depends on the competent functioning of several cognitive domains that subserve perception of social cues and the generation of motivated social behavior. We propose to conduct a pharmacological challenge study of OT vs. placebo administration to study the effects of OT on specific components of social cognition in male deficit syndrome SCZ subjects.

Primary Hypothesis: Intranasal OT will improve social cognition in subjects with deficit syndrome SCZ.

Conditions

• Schizophrenia

Interventions

DRUG

Oxytocin

OT intervention will be administration of OT intranasally at a dose of three 4 IU puffs per nostril for a total dose of 24 IU. This dose has been used in a number of other similarly designed challenge studies examining the effects of a single dose of OT (Kirsch et al. 2005; Kosfeld et al. 2005; Guastella et al. 2008a; Guastella et al. 2008b; Rimmele et al. 2009; Andari et al. 2010).

DRUG

Placebo

The PBO/control will consist of the OT vehicle only delivered as 3 puffs of saline per nostril for a total of 6 puffs. Each puff contains 0.1 ml in volume, so the total delivered will be 0.6 ml intranasally.

OTHER

Control

Participants who have no psychiatric diagnosis and will be controls for this project. These controls will NOT receive oxytocin or PBO. They will only receive psychiatric screening interview, MCCB Consensus Cogntive Battery assessment, urine drug screen, vision testing, and the three social cognition tasks.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Atlanta VA Medical Center

  collaborator FED

• Emory University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Erica J Duncan, MD · Emory University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

65 Years

Sex

MALE

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2013-03-31

Primary Completion

2017-03-15

Completion

2017-03-15

Countries

• United States

Study Locations