NCT03370341

Stimulating the Brain to Improve Self-Awareness

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 41 (actual)
• Sponsor: The University of Texas at Dallas · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 55 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

This study investigates whether Introspective Accuracy (IA) can be improved in individuals with schizophrenia by stimulating the brain via transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS).

Detailed description

Self-awareness is markedly impaired in severe mental illness including schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. This impairment spans awareness of symptoms as well as deficits in the estimation of abilities and capabilities, which we refer to as introspective accuracy (IA). Recent work has provided evidence of IA deficits in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, specifically in the abilities to retrospectively judge everyday functioning and neurocognitive impairment, as well as the ability to make correct real-time judgments of performance on neurocognitive tests. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) is a form of noninvasive neurostimulation which has been proposed as a therapeutic procedure in numerous psychiatric disorders. TDCS in healthy adults has been demonstrated to improve cognitive and memory performance, and in schizophrenia, tDCS has been found to improve emotion recognition ability. TDCS thus appears to be a promising therapeutic technique that may be useful for improving IA. This study will compare IA performance in individuals with schizophrenia across two conditions: active anodal tDCS and sham tDCS.

Conditions

• Schizophrenia
• Schizoaffective Disorder

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	active anodal tDCS	active anodal tDCS with behavioral tasks to assess IA
DEVICE	sham tDCS	sham tDCS with behavioral tasks to assess IA

Timeline

• Start date: 2017-12-01
• Primary completion: 2019-12-01
• Completion: 2019-12-01
• First posted: 2017-12-12
• Last updated: 2023-03-22
• Results posted: 2022-08-03

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States

Regulatory

• FDA-regulated device study