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

精神分裂症是一种严重的衰弱疾病，影响着1%的人口。它的特征是一系列症状，包括错误的信念、错误的看法和杂乱无章的思维。药物可以减轻这些症状，但每个人的反应都不同，以一种不可预测的方式。因此，要找到对某个人最有效的治疗方法，需要尝试S系列不同的药物，这往往需要很长时间，并延长患者的痛苦。这项研究的目的是找出是否有可能预测给定患者对特定药物的反应如何，而不必经历试验期的治疗。这将通过在给予治疗之前测量一些事情，然后评估这些措施中的哪一项最能预测治疗的效果来实现。研究人员将对一大群以前没有接受过治疗的患者进行脑部扫描，并获取人口统计学、临床和心理信息。研究人员预计，这些测量方法可以帮助预测患者对抗精神病药物的反应有多好，一些很容易评估的简单事情可能与脑扫描等更复杂的测量方法一样有用。这项研究应该可以帮助医生为他们看过的每个病人选择最合适的治疗方法。

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.