To add to our understanding of the relationship between blushing, symptom severity and
potential mechanisms that underlie blushing in patients with Social Phobia (SP), the
investigators propose comparing SP patients' vascular responses to topical m-N pre and post
treatment with Seroquel or placebo.
Atypical antipsychotics such as seroquel have been used successfully as adjunctive treatments
in other anxiety disorders, including PTSD (Labatte, 2001; Krashin & Oates, 1999; McDougle et
al., 2000; Pfanner et al., 2000; Bogetto et al., 2000) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder
(Katzman et al., 2005). Responses to the blushing exposure will be assessed prior to and
following treatment with seroquel or placebo and at one month following intervention. Levels
of prostaglandin will be compared between groups and will also be correlated with symptom
severity in the clinical groups.
The objective of this randomized, double blind flexible -dose study will be to evaluate the
efficacy , safety and tolerability of seroquel SR 50mg to 800mg and placebo in outpatient
subjects diagnosed with SP. The study will begin with a single week of Seroquel 50mg or
placebo. Subsequently, tablets will be administered by the investigator in a flexible dose
fashion during the visits. Patients will be followed up weekly (biweekly after week 6) and at
the clinician's discretion. After the fist week the patients' dosage will be increased up to
a maximum of 800 mg daily with expected average dose of 300mg dail. This dose will remain
fixed after 8 weeks of treatment until week 16.