The Effect of Oxytocin Administration on Interpersonal Cooperation in Borderline Personality Disorder Patients and Healthy Adults

ID#: NCT02225600

Age: 18 - 55 years

Gender: All

Healthy Subjects: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Study Phase: N/A

Recruitment Status: Recruiting

Start Date: May 01, 2013

End Date: December 01, 2018

Contact Information:
Harold Koenigsberg, MD
212-241-0441
Summary: The study will examine behavioral patterns and underlying neural correlates which distinguish patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) from healthy subjects as they participate in a two-person trust game and will determine whether administration of intranasal oxytocin (OT) will normalize trust game performance and concomitant neural processing in the BPD group.
Eligibility:

Inclusion Criteria:

- BPD subjects meets criteria for DSM-IV Borderline Personality Disorder.

- 18 to 55 years old

- Healthy controls are free of any lifetime DSM-IV Axis I or Axis II diagnosis. However, to avoid a group of HC's too highly groomed and unrepresentative of the general population subjects meeting criteria for a past Axis I diagnosis of adjustment, dysthymic, or depressive NOS disorders, specific phobias, and sleep disorders will not be excluded. Subjects will not be excluded for a non-IV substance abuse disorder more than 6 months prior to enrollment.

- All subjects will be free of psychotropic medications for 2 weeks (6 weeks for fluoxetine).

- Subjects may be enrolled in psychotherapy.

Exclusion Criteria:

- BPD subjects not meeting DSM-IV criteria for past or present bipolar I disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, substance dependence, head trauma, CNS neurological disease, seizure disorder or current major depression. Since depression is commonly associated with BPD, too stringent a depression exclusion criterion would yield a clinically atypical BPD sample. For this reason, BPD patients with Axis I depressive disorders other than major depression and those with a past history of major depression will not be excluded.

- Substance abuse disorder in the prior 6 months

- Significant medical illness

- Pregnancy

- Metallic foreign-bodies that contraindicate MRI