Conditions: Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Keywords: Anxiety disorders Generalized anxiety
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 32
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
The purpose of this study is to find out how an anti-anxiety drug or placebo affects the activity of your brain when you are at rest and when you are viewing emotional material, such as, emotional faces and pictures.

Detailed description:
This is an exploratory study to evaluate the usefulness of fMRI as a biomarker to measure the response to a known, FDA approved marketed anxiolytic. As such, this is not a study testing safety and efficacy of an approved medicine; it is a study to evaluate the usefulness of fMRI (a non-significant risk device procedure) to correlate the clinical/behavioral effects of a marketed anxiolytic with brain activity assessed by magnetic resonance imaging. fMRI is a more direct measure of brain function than behavior, outcomes are quantitative and objective. As such, it may be more specific, i.e., may be more sensitive to drug effects or show them earlier than clinical endpoints and enable determination of efficacy in smaller or shorter studies than those required to show effects on clinical endpoints. Finally, imaging may allow differentiation of placebo responders from true drug responders.

Arms:
arm 1: Alprazolam, an FDA-approved drug, will be administered to 24 patients with generalized anxiety disorder. arm 2: A placebo comparator will be administered to 12 patients with generalized anxiety disorder

Interventions: intervention 1: Alprazolam (Xanax) intervention 2: Placebo
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Drug dose will be fixed across patients: alprazolam 0.5 mg b.i.d escalating to 1.0 mg b.i.d. The treatment duration will be approximately 28 days (4 weeks). intervention 2: Placebo, bid, p.o. for 28 +/- 2 days.

Protocol document: