Losartan and Emotional Learning
ConditionEmotional Processing
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseEarly Phase 1
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age18-50
SponsorUniversity of Oxford
About this trial
This study explores the effects of single-dose losartan (50mg) versus placebo on emotional processing in healthy volunteers.
Eligibility criteria
This trial accepts healthy volunteersQualifiers
Willing and able to provide informed consent
Aged 18-50 years
Score of or below 45 on the Dimensional Anhedonia Rating Scale (DARS; Rizvi et al., 2015)
Sufficient written and spoken English skills to understand what the study involves, and to complete the questionnaires
Disqualifiers
Past or present DSM-5 axis-I diagnosis (based on SCID results at screening) other than anxiety disorder, dysthymia or unipolar depression
First-degree family member with severe psychiatric illness
CNS-medication last 6 weeks (including as part of another study)
Current blood pressure or other heart medication (especially aliskiren or beta blockers)
Trial design
Design model
Parallel
Treatments tested in this trial
Losartan potassium 50mg
DrugSingle dose losartan (50 mg, weight-adjusted), encapsulated identically to placebo
Placebo
Other interventionSingle tablet encapsulated identically to losartan
Treatment groups
60 Participants
are divided into 2 treatment groupsGroup A: losartanExperimental treatment 1 intervention
Group B: placeboPlacebo comparator 1 intervention
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
Reinforcement Learning
reinforcement learning, calculated as the learning rate from aversive and appetitive decision outcomes. Larger scores indicate better learning from an outcome.
Time frame
1 hour after capsule intakeSecondary outcomes
1
Cognitive Flexibility
switch cost, calculated by rank-ordering the differences between each switch trial RT and each participants average RT for all non-switch trials from 1 - 10 (with better and worse bins having values closer to 1 and 10, respectively), and then summing the bin values to compute a total bin score for each participant. Inaccurate responses are penalized by being assigned a score of 20. Smaller bin scores indicate greater accuracy and lower RT.
Time frame
1 hour after capsule intake2
AAT effect score
mean reaction time of the pull trials of a valence category subtracted from the push trials of the same category, yielding a single indicator of approach/avoidance, with positive scores indicating relatively stronger approach and negative scores indicating relatively stronger avoidance
Time frame
1hour after capsule intake3
Motivational effort in the Apples Task
effort valuation, calculated as the willingness to engage in physical effort to obtain rewards of certain values using the Apples Task (and computational approaches)
Time frame
1hour after capsule intakeSponsors and contacts
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
University of Oxford
Lead sponsor
National Institute for Health Research, United Kingdom
Collaborator
Source ClinicalTrials.gov