Sarcosine May Induce EGF Production or Inhibit the Decline in EGF Concentrations in Patients with Chronic Schizophrenia (Results of the PULSAR Study)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sarcosine (N-methylglycine), a glutamatergic modulator, reduces the primary negative symptoms of schizophrenia. These beneficial changes might be mediated by trophic factors such as epidermal growth factor (EGF). We assessed associations between initial serum EGF levels or changes in serum EGF levels and symptom severity during the addition of sarcosine to stable antipsychotic treatment and thereby evaluated the associations between glutamatergic modulation, clinical changes and peripheral EGF concentrations. Fifty-eight subjects with a diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia with dominant negative symptoms, stably treated with antipsychotics, completed a prospective 6-month, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. Subjects received orally 2 g of sarcosine (n = 28) or placebo (n = 30) daily. Serum EGF levels and symptom severity (using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and the Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS)) were assessed at baseline, 6-week and 6-month follow-up. Augmentation antipsychotic treatment with sarcosine had no effect on EGF serum levels at any time points. Only the sarcosine group showed a significant improvement in negative symptoms, general psychopathology subscales and the overall PANSS score. We found a reduction in serum EGF levels in the placebo group, but levels in the sarcosine remained stable during the study. Our data indicate that improvement in negative symptoms due to sarcosine augmentation is not directly mediated by EGF, but effective treatment may induce the production or block the decrease in EGF concentrations, which indicates the neuroprotective effect of treatment and confirms the relationship between neuroprotection and EGF levels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".