Active clinical trials for "Schizophrenia"

Schizophrenia affects cognition, emotion, and behavior. Neuropsychological assessment enables a better understanding of antipsychotic effectiveness and the brain processes, underlying cognitive functioning in schizophrenia. Neurocognitive deficits in schizophrenia patients appears to explain up to 61% of the variance of functional outcome and is an important predictor of social reintegration (Peuskens et al, 2005) and independent living activitiy (Green et al, 2004). Impaired social functioning within schizophrenia population has been associated with increased health-care costs. Since social and occupational disability may generate the largest indirect costs of the illness, treatment of cognitive deficits has an enormous impact on the cost and disability associated with schizophrenia (McGurk and Mueser, 2004). However, the gap between cognitive science and clinical practice limits the implementation of cognitive assessment in the routine evaluation of schizophrenia patients. Pharmaceutical industry initiated numerous large scale, multisite studies on the impact of novel antipsychotics on cognitive deficits in schizophrenia patients. The aim of this research is to develop population norms of the computerized neuropsychological assessment for effectiveness of the antipsychotic treatment in schizophrenia.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate clinical meaning of EEG changes in antipsychotic-treated patients with schizophrenia.

Almost all of antipsychotics can induce metabolic syndrome,Genetic factors play a key role in the development of metabolic syndrome,TCF7L2 and SLC30A8 are strongestly correlated with metabolic syndrome.Moreover,Antipsychotics have an effect on the expression of TCF7L2 and SLC30A8 genes.It indicates the variations of TCF7L2 and SLC30A8 play an important part in the development of antipsychotics-induced metabolic syndrome.

Schizophrenia is considered as the most frequent and the most severe chronic psychotic disorder. Its evolutionary modes and its clinical symptomatology remain particularly heterogeneous. Moreover, the brain processes involved in schizophrenia are still far from being clearly understood. Current empirical studies provide a mean duration comprised between 1 and 3 years without any specific diagnosis or treatment. These diagnosis issues are partly based on difficulties in the early distinction between schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorders (BD). These results emphasize the necessity of new early indices (or endophenotypes). Such markers are intended to be more specific than classical clinical manifestations. In other words, they have to be absent among patients with differential diagnosis, such as BD. Among other possible early indices, several electrophysiological disturbances have been explored. Our study is designed to mainly describe the N400 component among patients with schizophrenia or BD. This component is classically interpreted as indexing the integration the meaning of a linguistic stimulus in its preceding context. Our main hypothesis aims to show a specific alteration of N400 component among patients with schizophrenia when compared to participants with BD. The second aim of this study concerns the exploration of four other event related potentials (ERPs) among patients with schizophrenia or BD: the P50 component, involved in early sensory gating processes, the P300 component, thought to reflect attentional resource allocation and working memory updating of stimulus context, the P600 component, elicited during same paradigms than N400, and reflecting their syntactic congruity. the CNV (Contingent Negative Variation), reflecting processes of motor anticipation Regarding to their potential 'endophenotypes' status, our aim consists in comparing the N400 and three other ERPs among patients with schizophrenia or bipolar affective disorder. Since the schizophrenic specificity of such ERPs alterations still remains rarely studied, we also propose to describe the possible relations between these ERPs results and clinical scores observed among patients.

The aim of this study is to explore the levels of internalized stigma in a sample of young patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

This study aims to evaluate the presence of lung function impairment in a sample of patients diagnosed with non-affective psychosis.

The objective of AlterEgo is the creation of an interactive cognitive architecture, implementable in various artificial agents, allowing a continuous interaction with patients suffering from social disorders, by virtue of changes in behavioural (robot-based) as well as morphological (avatar-based) properties of that agent. The project includes research in fundamental and clinical neurosciences, interaction modeling, development of new computer-vision techniques and human-robot interfaces, as well as evaluation of the scenarios with patients before, during, and after training sessions. At the end of the project, the investigators will produce a new avatar-based clinical method able to enhance social interaction of patients. The first challenge of this project is to create an avatar alter ego of a patient. Based on recent work in social robotics and neurosciences, the investigators hypothesize that if patients face artificial agents morphologically and behaviourally similar to them, they will increase their social interaction. The second challenge is to transform the morphology and the behaviour of the similar artificial agent into that of a healthy and different agent. The investigators assume that the smooth and continuous behavioural shift from similar/unhealthy to complementary/healthy social behaviour will lead to a better social rehabilitation. AlterEgo opens the door to a new generation of social artificial agents in service robotics. AlterEgo is an interdisciplinary project at the interaction of Social Motor Neurosciences (UM1), Robotics (EPFL), Complex Systems Dynamics (UOB), Computer Vision (DFKI), and Psychiatry (CHU). This project includes a set of experiments that started in april 2014 and will terminate in september 2016 before undergoing a randomised clinical research.

Schizophrenia is an invalidating psychiatric illness with a strong genetic component characterized by abnormal processing of emotional information. This alteration in emotion processing has been described in acute as well as in remission phases of the illness. It has also been found in healthy relatives of patients with schizophrenia and in subjects at high risk of psychosis. Thus, alterations in emotional information processing are not only linked to the prognosis but can also be considered as a marker of vulnerability of schizophrenia. In addition, schizophrenia patients differ from healthy controls in neural activity in brain regions implicated in emotions processing. However, interpretation of findings in patients is limited by confounding factors, such as antipsychotic treatments or alterations due to the course of illness. Also, there is no data concerning genetic factors (polymorphisms or gene expression) underlying these patterns of cerebral activation in emotion information processing. So, the main objective of this study is to compare the cerebral activity of schizophrenia patients to that of healthy siblings and healthy controls in an emotional processing task.

This study will assess the effects of D-serine adjuvant treatment to the ongoing pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia patients that are resistant to treatments.

BACKGROUND It is demonstrated that strong associations between trauma suffered in childhood and having schizophrenia, and more specifically to experience acoustic-verbal hallucinations (AVH). A second generation of research is currently examining the cognitive and affective processes likely to play a mediating role in this association. These mediators appear to include early maladaptive personality patterns and dissociative experiences. Although these factors have most often been explored separately, recent research indicates that they could be associated, and thus contribute to AVH. More specifically, another study has shown that the association between childhood trauma and predisposition to AVH is not direct but depends on cognitive factors including the impact of violence suffered during childhood on early maladaptive schemas and dissociation. However, this study was carried out on a non-clinical sample of subjects with a predisposition to AVH. OBJECTIVES: testing a structural model of AVH, childhood trauma, early maladaptive schemas and dissociative symptoms in large multicentric sample of inpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia and AVH (n=350). Secondary objectives are (i) test in the model the role of all the early patterns described by Jeffrey Young instead of targeting only the schemes that are part of the model tested in previous study as the one by Bortolon and colleagues, (ii) compare the quality of the adjustment of the confirmatory model to the quality of the adjustment of the exploratory model. METHODS: one single visit in which subjects will receive self-reported questionnaires (Childhood trauma questionnaire, The Young schema questionnaire short form, Dissociative experiences scale, Launay-Slade hallucination scale and Cardiff Anomalous Perceptions Scale. ANALYSES: Structural equation model performed additional analysis using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling. The primary endpoint corresponds to significant associations between the variables. The quality of the model will be assessed using a fit quality measure. The secondary endpoints are significant associations between the different variables (p <0.05) and the model quality assessed with a quality measure of the fit. MAIN HYPOTHESIS: the association between childhood trauma and predisposition to AVH is not direct, but depends on the impact of violence suffered during childhood on early maladaptive schemas and dissociative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia.