Acute Glycine Pharmacodynamic Study

High doses of glycine (0.4-0.8 g/kg/day) administered orally along with certain antipsychotic medications can improve negative symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., Heresco-Levy et al., 1999). The therapeutic effect appears to be due to glycine's co-agonist activity at glutamatergic N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors, which may correct the glutamatergic hypofunction associated with schizophrenia (e.g., Bergeron et al., 1998). Unfortunately, the therapeutic benefits of orally administered glycine are variable, in part because gut glycine absorption and resultant plasma (and presumably brain) glycine increases are variable (Silk et al., 1974). Even with intravenous glycine administration, which bypasses variability contributed by gut absorption and metabolism, between-subject variability in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) glycine increments is large (D'Souza et al., 2000), suggesting that brain glycine uptake, metabolism, and turnover differ substantially among individuals.

If brain glycine increments after oral glycine dosing are highly variable, those manifesting smaller or more transient brain glycine increments may not experience clinically significant effects. As a result, glycine's therapeutic efficacy could be underappreciated. Indeed, a multi-site glycine trial in schizophrenia subjects concluded that glycine is not a "...generally effective therapeutic option for treating negative symptoms or cognitive impairments", but included the caveat that "...it is not known if efficacy would have been achieved at substantially higher serum glycine levels" (Buchanan et al., 2007).

Accordingly, we believe that it is important to fully characterize glycine's brain and plasma pharmacodynamic variability, which we will do in healthy subjects and in several members of a family with some members possessing a mutation in their glycine decarboxylase gene (GLDC), which may be associated with abnormal baseline brain and plasma glycine levels and increments after glycine administration. We will use an MRS method we developed to detect brain glycine increases after high-dose oral glycine administration (Prescot et al., 2006; Kaufman et al., 2009) along with standard analytical methods to determine plasma glycine levels.