Home › Schizophrenia › NCT04807530
Medial-prefrontal Enhancement During Schizophrenia Systems Imaging
Causal Role of Medial Prefrontal Neural Activity in Self-Agency in Schizophrenia
Who can join
Ages 18 to 64 · All sexes · Healthy volunteers welcome
Full eligibility criteria
Inclusion Criteria: All Subjects: * Good general physical health * English is first language * No neurological disorder * Meets MRI criteria * No current alcohol or substance use disorder Schizophrenia participants: * Schizophrenia diagnosis of any illness duration, * Clinical stability, defined as 12 weeks outpatient status and 4 weeks low to moderate dose of antipsychotic medication (\<1000 mg. chlorpromazine equivalents), plus stable doses of all other psychotropic medications Exclusion Criteria: All Subjects: * Implanted metallic parts of implanted electronic devices * Pregnant or trying to become pregnant * Any condition that would prevent the subject from giving voluntary informed consent * Scalp wounds or infections * Claustrophobia precluding MRI * Ongoing seizures * Neurological disorder
About the study
This randomized controlled trial in healthy controls (HC) and patients with schizophrenia (SZ) aims to examine 1) the underlying cognitive and neural cause of self-agency deficits in SZ; 2) the responsiveness to a novel navigated repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (nrTMS) target in the medial/superior prefrontal cortex (mPFC); and 3) how modulation of mPFC activity impacts the larger self-agency network to mediate changes in self-agency judgments. Our overall hypothesis is that increased mPFC excitability by active high-frequency nrTMS in HC and SZ will induce behavioral improvements in self-agency and neural changes in the larger self-agency network that will generalize to improvements in overall cognition, symptoms and daily functioning, and will likely lead to the development of new effective neuromodulation therapies in patients with schizophrenia.
What is being tested
- TMS (device)
Sponsor: University of California, San Francisco · Participants: 160 · Started: Nov 12, 2020
Contact the study team
- Karuna Subramaniam, Ph.D · Phone: 415-221-4810
Official record on ClinicalTrials.gov — NCT04807530
Locations in the U.S.
| California | UCSF, San Francisco |
Conditions
From ClinicalTrials.gov, data retrieved Sep 30, 2026. Each study sets its own eligibility; the study team decides who can join.