Here’s the table from the full article of Pramipexole adjunctive to Haloperidol showing differences in PANSS scores for the 15 patients included in the study… Looking at the Negative Subscale, the scores are interesting indeed. What bothers me though is that the PANSS negative subscale includes things such as Stereotyped Thinking, Lack of spontaneity and flow in conversation, Poor rapport, and Difficulty in abstract thinking which could all potentially be partly explained by positive symptoms or cognitive symptoms and may hardly have anything to do with motivational and hedonic deficits specifically. Patients could have improved in those aspects and it would already have dramatically reduced their PANNS-Neg. scores…They don’t break down individual negative symptoms improvement so it’s always difficult to conclude anything. But again, Prami has successfully been used in treatment resistant depression and parkinson’s with anhedonia so that is still encouraging. One thing to note also is that in the Haloperidol-Pramipexole study they’d increase Pramipexole dosages to as high as 10.25mg/day, whereas in the TR-Depression and Parkinson’s studies they’d only go as high as 5mg/day I believe.
Here’s a link in which the individual PANSS subscales items are explained if anybody’s interested.
http://egret.psychol.cam.ac.uk/medicine/scales/PANSS