L-carnosine as an adjuvant to fluvoxamine in treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder: A randomized double-blind study

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Carnosine in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Dysregulation of glutamate is implicated in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Consistently, glutamate-modulating agents, such as riluzole and memantine have been used in OCD treatment.

Who Took Part

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

Forty-four patients diagnosed with moderate to severe OCD were recruited in a randomized double-blind trial.

Patients received either L-carnosine or placebo as adjuvant to fluvoxamine for 10 weeks.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Carnosine and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Carnosine, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

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

A time span of 10 weeks appears in the methods.

The Yale- Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) was used for assessing the severity of symptoms at baseline and at weeks 4, 8, and 10.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Carnosine, Fluvoxamine, Linear Models, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Psychiatric Status Rating Scales and Psychotropic Drugs.

Author keywords: L-carnosine, clinical trial, glutamate and obsessive compulsive disorder.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Carnosine over 10 weeks.

Its findings take up roughly 3 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2017 (Human psychopharmacology), a journal based in England.

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