I attended my screening interview for the Autifony Trial this morning. I had expected that I might be ruled out for either of two reasons: 1) Insufficient Hearing Loss. 2) Recent use of anti-depressants. In fact, neither of those two things seemed to concern the trial doctor very much. They performed a blood pressure test and they found that my blood pressure was quite high. They discussed amongst themselves whether I should be excluded due to high blood pressure but (luckily) they reached the conclusion that high blood pressure was not sufficient grounds for exclusion. They performed a reasonably thorough examination of my general health. Surprisingly, my hearing was just about the only thing that they did not test. Eventually, they told me that I have been accepted on to the trial but this is conditional upon the results of various tests which were performed during the examination (blood and urine analysis etc). They basically want to be sure that I do not have any other health problems which may affect my ability to participate in the trial.
I was given the impression that the requirement for hearing loss is not so inflexible as we had assumed. Too much hearing loss would make someone ineligible to participate but it does not seem that too little hearing loss would be a basis for exclusion. Also use of anti-depressants would not automatically make someone ineligible to participate. It would be at the discretion of the doctor in charge of the trial. I stopped taking Prozac just before Christmas but the doctor implied that even if I was still taking it, I would not necessarily have been excluded because of that.
Finally, I asked about confidentiality. Specifically, I asked whether I would be permitted to discuss the effects of the trial drug on this forum. I was told that it will be OK to discuss the effects of the drug on here but obviously I will not know whether I am being given the actual drug or the placebo. Perhaps we should start an AUT00063 User Experiences thread on the Treatments section of the forum. What do the moderators think?