I appreciate Dr. Yung's comments on our pharmacotherapeutic treatment trial in a sample of young persons with "prodromal" symptoms and high risk for becoming psychotic within a short period of time. It was her work with Pat McGorry that first demonstrated this population could be identified, thus opening up the potential for prospective study of the mechanisms of onset and the study of treatment as preventive as opposed to merely ameliorative. We were concerned about the high dropout rate for obvious reasons, but in retrospect we should not have been surprised. Our sample was young and perhaps more resistant for that reason, as Dr. Yung implies, but the fact is that 2 years is a very long clinical trail no matter what the age! In part we wanted to allow sufficient time to elapse to capture higher numbers of converting subjects, and that still seems to be a reasonable strategy insofar as the conversion rate in the placebo group had not clearly plateaued by 1 year. Nevertheless, in retrospect, a trial of 2 years was unrealistic.

The optimal design, clearly, would be larger...  Read more

I appreciate Dr. Yung's comments on our pharmacotherapeutic treatment trial in a sample of young persons with "prodromal" symptoms and high risk for becoming psychotic within a short period of time. It was her work with Pat McGorry that first demonstrated this population could be identified, thus opening up the potential for prospective study of the mechanisms of onset and the study of treatment as preventive as opposed to merely ameliorative. We were concerned about the high dropout rate for obvious reasons, but in retrospect we should not have been surprised. Our sample was young and perhaps more resistant for that reason, as Dr. Yung implies, but the fact is that 2 years is a very long clinical trail no matter what the age! In part we wanted to allow sufficient time to elapse to capture higher numbers of converting subjects, and that still seems to be a reasonable strategy insofar as the conversion rate in the placebo group had not clearly plateaued by 1 year. Nevertheless, in retrospect, a trial of 2 years was unrealistic.

The optimal design, clearly, would be larger samples treated for a shorter period, but recruiting larger samples proved to be very difficult, even with four sites, which gets to Dr. Yung's final point. The true positive prodromal person/patient emerges in the population at the incidence rate of schizophrenia which is not robust (one in 10,000 per year). Furthermore, the earliest symptoms are often negative in nature and hard to identify, especially if the person is no longer living at home with family, that is, with people who might be sensitive to nuance changes. The bottom line is that research in this field is an uphill battle vis-à-vis sampling and recruitment. Yet I feel strongly that such samples are extraordinarily valuable for studies of the pathophysiology and preventive treatment of schizophrenia because, unlike retrospective studies, predictions that are prospectively falsifiable can be made and tested.

Therefore, like Dr. Yung, I endorse current efforts to consolidate samples across sites and to plan studies that are multisite so that sufficient numbers of such potentially informative patients can be gathered and pooled. In North America, for example, eight sites have used a common prodromal assessment battery (the same assessment instruments used in the Lilly clinical trial) and have pooled their data with the help of supplemental funds from NIMH. This group, called the North American Prodromal Longitudinal Study (NAPLS), includes three of the sites from the Lilly trial (Yale, UNC, and Toronto) and five additional sites (Harvard, Hillside, Emory, UCLA, and UCSD). Together, the group has a consolidated sample of over 400 prodromal patients, thus demonstrating that the "prodromal recruitment problem" is not insurmountable.