STRATA Version 1.0
Research type
Research Study
Full title
STRATA: Investigating factors associated with response to antipsychotic treatment
IRAS ID
163895
Contact name
Keith Brennan
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
People with schizophrenia suffer from a range of symptoms including hallucinations (such as hearing voices), delusions (false beliefs) and thought disorder (thoughts not flowing in a logical way), as well as 'negative symptoms' such as a lack of motivation and withdrawal from social contact. Currently, antipsychotic medication is the mainstay of treatment of schizophrenia and are thought to work by acting to reduce transmission of a brain chemical called dopamine. However, even after attempts to treat the disorder with two different antipsychotics, around 30% of patients still fail to improve. When this happens, the medical guidelines recommend treatment with a different drug called clozapine. However clozapine has several side effects and requires regular blood tests, so people do not like taking it. It is also ineffective in some patients.
The result is that a large number of patients spend too long on ineffective drugs which impact greatly on their mental health, well-being and quality of life whilst the costs of ineffective treatment is a huge financial burden to the NHS.
This study will use neuroimaging techniques, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) to confirm recent evidence of a neurobiologically distinct subtype of responsiveness to medication in schizophrenia, based on differences in dopamine and glutamate function in order to develop a clinically useful, acceptable and cost-effective stratification tool so that in the future clinicians will be able to predict, ultimately as early as first admission, which patients will respond to standard dopamine drugs and which people are instead more likely to respond to the new glutamate drugs.REC name
London - Surrey Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/0038
Date of REC Opinion
23 Jan 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion