Clinical Research Directory

Evaluation of the Specialized Clinic for Nutrition and Mental Health: A Pilot Study

The goal of this observational pilot study is to learn how personalized nutrition-focused care can help people with mental and psychosomatic health problems. This study takes place in Europe's first outpatient clinic that focuses on how diet affects mental well-being. The main questions the study aims to answer are: Does care at this clinic help lower participants' stress levels over one year? Do participants report better mental health, resilience, and quality of life during the study? Are improvements in mental health linked to changes in diet and blood markers like inflammation? Participants will: Fill out online questionnaires every 3 months over one year. These ask about stress, physical symptoms, quality of life, diet, and satisfaction with care. Give small blood samples during their regular clinic visits. These samples will be checked for common health markers such as inflammation. This study will help researchers understand whether nutrition-focused care can support mental and physical health, and whether this approach should be tested in larger future studies.

Psychiatric Consultation-Liaison Intervention in Primary Care: A Pilot Study

The pilot study on the impact of a Psychiatric Consultation-Liaison Intervention in Primary Care Medical Consultations in French-speaking Switzerland (PLIMeC-P), is a mixed method randomized controlled trial. The investigated health-related intervention is a brief Consultation-Liaison (CL) psychiatry intervention in primary care. Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) have a key role in preventing, detecting, and managing mental disorders. Therefore, the optimization of both the quality of their interventions and their cooperation with psychiatric and psychological care networks are important challenges. It is well demonstrated that multidisciplinary interventions improve the efficacy of mental health care, CL psychiatry being one such type of intervention. Therefore, community CL-psychiatry, for example in private primary care group practices, are rare. The impact of such community, primary care CL-psychiatry interventions, should be investigated. The mixed methods randomized controlled trial PLIMeC study will examine the impact of a CL-psychiatric intervention in primary care settings, for newly reported mental illness, versus a Treatment As Usual (TAU) control arm. The intervention consists of a CL-psychiatric intervention into private medical practices, provided to patients suffering from mental health problems, a group of patients generally under-treated. The CL-psychiatrist will receive and discuss PCPs' referrals for patients with mental distress, who don't have a psychiatric follow-up. After a brief intervention (1-4 sessions), feedback conjoint (PCP-psychiatrist) session will be organized, to complete the intervention and provide proposals. The pilot study (PLIMeC-P) will determine whether the main planned study (PLIMeC) is feasible and practicable. It will be conducted on two sites, the Neuchâtel Psychiatry Centre (CNP) and the North-west Adult Psychiatry Service (SPANO), Department of Psychiatry of CHUV, Yverdon. For the pilot study (PLIMeC-P), 15 eligible participants are expected for each group, 30 participants in total. They will be recruited in three private primary care group practices. After eligibility and randomization 15 participants will be included for the intervention arm (brief CL-psychiatric intervention) and 15 for the control arm (TAU). The expected number of participants for the main trial (PLIMeC) will be estimated through analysis of the initial results of the PLIMeC-P.