Conditions: Schizophrenia
Keywords: schizophrenia
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 16
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
The purpose of this research study is to determine whether a short-term administration of an investigational study drug may provide evidence of improvement in cognitive functioning in a group of stable male subjects with schizophrenia.

Detailed description:
The goal of this study is to determine whether the short-term (4 week), double-blind administration of Merck L-830982 provides evidence of improvement in cognitive functioning in stable male subjects with schizophrenia. This initial, small sample size study (n=9 on L-830982 and n=6 on placebo) is restricted to males in order to reduce the variance that might be attributable to the well-documented sex differences in the clinical features of schizophrenia.

Arms:
arm 1: None arm 2: None

Interventions: intervention 1: Merck L-830982 intervention 2: Placebo
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: The initial dose of L-830982 was 3.0 mg twice daily (b.i.d.) the dosage increased to 5.0 mg b.i.d. at the end of week 1 and 8.0 mg b.i.d. at the end of week 2, which was continued for the remaining 2 weeks of the trial. Medications were dispensed weekly in blister packs by the hospital pharmacy. intervention 2: Medications were dispensed weekly in blister packs by the hospital pharmacy, using the same number of pills as those on active drug.

Protocol document: