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Maintenance ElectroConvulsive Therapy in Clozapine RESISTant Schizophrenia - the MECT-RESIST Trial

NCT06456983 · Status: RECRUITING · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 140

Last updated 2026-02-03

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Schizophrenia is one of the most severe and costliest mental disorders in terms of human suffering and societal expenditure. About 15-30% of patients do not respond to all known antipsychotics, including clozapine, the current gold-standard in these cases. Hence, a recent Cochrane review stated that the quality of the existing studies is too poor to recommend any intervention in addition to clozapine and that new, randomized controlled trials independent from the pharmaceutical industry need to be performed to substantially improve patient care. Although electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was initially used to treat schizophrenia, it is nowadays by far underused in the therapy of schizophrenia in many countries. ECT is well known to be highly effective in clozapine-treatment-resistant schizophrenia (CRS), and synergistic effects of clozapine and ECT have been demonstrated. However, relapse rates after successful courses of ECT are still very high, and evidence for maintenance ECT (mECT) in CRS is scarce at best. In a multi-center trial the investigators aim to examine the effectiveness of mECT in treatment-resistant patients with schizophrenia who improved after a course of routine ECT. If mECT will lead to a later timepoint of relapse and/or to a higher proportion of relapse-free patients compared to those undergoing treatment as usual, this trial would have an enormous impact on therapeutic strategies for "treatment-resistant" patients and would induce a profound change of current treatment guidelines, where ECT still ranks at the level of ultima ratio, despite accumulating evidence suggesting otherwise.

Conditions

Interventions

DEVICE

maintenance electroconvulsive therapy (mECT)

see Arms

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Alexander Sartorius, Prof · Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH), Mannheim, Germany

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Max Age
75 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2025-02-14
Primary Completion
2027-07-31
Completion
2028-07-31

Countries

  • Germany

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 NCT06456983 on ClinicalTrials.gov