Secretin effects on cerebellar-dependent motor learning in schizophrenia

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Secretin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Pervasive cognitive deficits in schizophrenia are a major cause of disability among individuals with the disorder.

Who Took Part

The study group was 25 individuals.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Comparison groups were formed by yoking pairs of subjects on the basis of performance during the pretreatment baseline eye-blink conditioning recording session, and thus 20 subjects underwent further analysis.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The individuals were allocated by chance, so the Secretin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Blinding on both sides kept the individuals and researchers unaware of who received Secretin.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Secretin group a baseline to be compared against.

Secretin was selected because eye-blink conditioning depends on the release of Purkinje cell inhibition on deep nuclei of the cerebellum and recent findings indicate that secretin is endogenously released in the cerebellum, where it acts as a retrograde messenger and neuromodulator on basket and Purkinje cells.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Association Learning, Cerebellum, Cognition Disorders, Conditioning, Eyelid, Schizophrenia, Schizophrenic Psychology and Secretin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Secretin in 25 individuals.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 3 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2009 (The American journal of psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Secretin compound page, all human trials.