Swedish researchers have begun a clinical trial to evaluate whether a drug against prostate cancer could help prevent pedophile behavior and they rely on online donations to help finish.
team is going to meet the public to collect £ 38,000 ($ 53,000) through a campaign launched today Walacea, a UK crowdfunding site for scientific research. They hope to show that the drug, which lowers testosterone levels in the body, will reduce pedophile impulses that could lead people to abuse a child. So far, the researchers recruited "four or five" participants, but they ultimately aim to enroll 60 men, the principal investigator of the trial, Christoffer Rahm, at a press conference to announce the campaign in London on Wednesday .
trial will not register sex offenders, said Rahm, psychiatry researcher at the Karolinska Institute (KI), near Stockholm; on the contrary, the project "wants to divert attention [to] preventing sexual abuse of children occur in the first place" targeting men who have sought help to deal with their pedophile impulses.
The trial participants are recruited by Preventell a "hotline to unwanted sex" Swedish led by Andrology Centre and Sexual Medicine at the Karolinska University Hospital . Since its creation in 2012, the helpline has received about 1,500 telephone calls of men who seek such help, said the center's director, Stefan Arver. This proves that "people with these thoughts really want to help," he said.
the medicine that the team will test Firmagon is called, also known as degarelix in its injectable form. it belongs to a class called gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonist, which means the drug competes with natural GnRH body and binds to its receptors in the brain, which ultimately blocks the production of testosterone in the testicles. Currently, the drug a form of "chemical castration" is only approved for treating prostate cancer.
Other types of drugs are already prescribed and sometimes mandated by law to treat sex offenders, including other drugs that alter the levels of testosterone and serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class antidepressants. But some of these drugs are effective only after several months, and their use is "based on very weak evidence," Niklas Långström, a psychiatric epidemiologist KI, said at the press conference.
this is partly because research in this area is plagued by complex ethical questions. the doctors discovered that patients have committed a criminal offense, such as pornography download involving children often must report to the police, so that "few people will be present" to ask for help, said forensic psychiatrist Donald Grubin of Newcastle University in the UK. the use of placebos in randomized controlled trials, the gold standard in drug testing raises questions as well. "the ethics committees do not look good giving sugar pills to potential offenders," said Grubin
Swedish regulators made sign on a controlled study, however. KI team plans to give half the participants a placebo, while the other half will receive the drug. To assess its effect, potentially "only two weeks after the injection and 3 months," the team will use a series of existing tests to measure three parameters: the high arousal, self-regulation, and empathy. testosterone is involved in the regulation of the three "most important risk factors for committing repeated sexual abuse," said Rahm. The study does not measure long-term effects on actual criminal offenses.
Rahm said he chose crowdfunding because public funding and a contribution from a private foundation fell short, while the team wanted to remain independent of the manufacturer of drugs, Ferring Pharmaceuticals. Funds raised will help pay for drugs, the salary of a research nurse, and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments.
The trial is part of a larger project that will also be looking for genetic, neurological, and hormonal markers linked to a risk of acting on pedophile impulses. The markers of the team can find probably would not be used to screen potential aggressors, Rahm said, but rather to identify those most likely to respond to treatment, or to confirm a psychiatric evaluation.
Most used testosterone regulators are GnRH agonists, which stimulate the GnRH receptor, rather than block, which causes an initial increase in testosterone production, before lowering the hormone levels in the body. They are often used to treat prostate cancer in men, or to remove the spontaneous ovulation in women undergoing fertility treatment. These drugs "take months to have an effect and the flare initial […] is not something you want in the acute phase" -the period when a person with a pedophile disorder is most at risk to act on its urges, Rahm said. As a GnRH antagonist, Firmagon does not have these disadvantages.
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