Predicting drug response in schizophrenia: are clinical & cognitive tests a cost-effective alternative to neuroimaging?

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Schizophrenia is a severely debilitating disorder affecting 1% of the population. It is characterized by a range of symptoms including false beliefs, false perceptions and disorganized thinking. Medication can reduce these symptoms, but the response varies from one individual to another, in an unpredictable way. As a result, finding the most useful treatment for a given person involves trying s series of different medications, which often takes a long time and prolongs patient suffering. The aim of this research is to find out whether it is possible to predict how well a given patient will respond to a particular medication, without having to go through a trial period of treatment. This will be achieved by measuring a number of things before treatment is given, and then assessing which of these measures best predicts how effective the treatment is. The researchers will carry out brain scans and acquire demographic, clinical and psychological information in a large group of patients who have not been treated before. The researchers expect that these measures can help predict how well a patient will respond to antipsychotic medication, and that some quite simple things that are easy to assess may be as useful as more complicated measures like brain scans. The research should help doctors choose the most suitable treatment for each patient they see.