Assessing the Effects of Fanapt® on Social Cognition in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a disabling disease that affects about 1% of the population and is one of the leading causes of psychiatric disability. Striking early in life, schizophrenia interferes with work, relationships, and independence. Despite the billions of dollars spent annually in the direct and indirect costs of this disease, there are few treatment options that restore functionality. Lately, cognition has emerged as a target for interventions, since a patient's cognitive status is one of the most reliable predictors of functional outcome, and yet treatments for improving cognition have delivered only modest results. This study will attempt to evaluate the efficacy of Fanapt® (iloperidone) on social cognition, which consists of factors such as empathy, social perception, and emotional recognition, and may be more meaningfully tied to functional outcome than cognition in general. This study will assess social cognition in people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who have newly begun taking Fanapt® (iloperidone), a new antipsychotic with mixed dopamine and serotonin antagonism. Standard measures of psychopathology and social cognition will be collected at baseline and then again at 12 weeks after becoming stable on the medication, by raters who are blind to the length of a subject's participation in the study. We predict that social cognition will improve with treatment with Fanapt®. This study has relatively few risks, including no risks beyond exposure to the study medication and the collection of safety data and psychometric data. The potential benefits outweigh the risks, with the main benefit being an ability to describe an improvement in cognitive performance that is believed to relate directly to real-world functional outcome.