Brief ReportBaseline and Amphetamine-Stimulated Dopamine Activity Are Related in Drug-Naïve Schizophrenic Subjects
Section snippets
Subjects
The protocol was approved by the institutional review boards of the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Patients and control subjects were subgroups from our previous study of baseline D2R occupancy by DA in schizophrenia (11). Patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia according to the DSM-IV. Only antipsychotic-naïve patients experiencing a first episode of illness were included. Control subjects were matched for age, gender, ethnicity, and parental
Results
Six drug-naïve patients experiencing a first episode of illness and eight healthy control subjects completed the study. One additionally recruited patient was withdrawn from the study due to side effects of αMPT. Subject characteristics are shown in Table 1.
Average BPND values for the three scans are shown in Table 2. The decrease in BPND after amphetamine administration was 18 ± 7% in patients and 10 ± 5% in control subjects compared with the baseline scan (p = .03). The increase in BPND after
Discussion
This study shows for the first time that amphetamine-induced DA release and baseline D2R occupancy by DA are very tightly correlated in drug-naïve patients with schizophrenia but not in control subjects. Furthermore, as previously shown, both measures are higher in patients compared with control subjects, detectable even in this small sample of subjects. This is the first report of a relationship between the changes in radioligand binding after amphetamine and those after αMPT within the same
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