Conditions: Stroke Hemispatial Neglect
Keywords: Neglect Attention Vigilance Stroke Hemineglect Unilateral Neglect Spatial Neglect
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: CROSSOVER
Enrollment: 13
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
To find out if spatial neglect following stroke and brain injury can be reduced using guanfacine, a drug that was shown to improve neglect in two stroke patients in a previous pilot study (Malhotra et al, 2006). In this trial, the effects of guanfacine will be examined in a larger number of patients, and there will also be a systematic assessment of whether the drug is only effective in patients with particular patterns of brain damage.

Detailed description:
The current study has a double-blind crossover design where patients will receive a single 2mg dose of oral guanfacine and a single dose of placebo. They will receive one of these on Day 2 of the study period and the other on Day 4.

They will be tested daily on Days 1 to 5 so that any test repetition or long-term drug effects can be gauged.

On days 2 and 4 they will be tested twice-once prior to drug/placebo administration and again 90 minutes after drug/placebo administration.

Tests will include standard pen-and-paper tasks for neglect as well as computerised tests of sustained attention and visual exploration. In our published pilot study (Malhotra et al, 2006) there was a suggestion that patients without damage to frontal cortex were more likely to respond to guanfacine. In the current study we intend to test 10 patients with and 10 patients without frontal damage in order to test this further.

Arms:
arm 1: All patients received a single dose of guanfacine on Day 2 and a single dose of placebo on Day 4. arm 2: All patients received a single dose of placebo on Day 2 and a single dose of guanfacine on Day 4.

Interventions: intervention 1: Guanfacine intervention 2: Placebo
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: 2mg oral guanfacine (encapsulated) intervention 2: placebo

Protocol document: