Drug offers hope to acute schizophrenics

Press, 20 May 1987, Page 47

Drug offers hope to acute schizophrenics

NZPA-AP Chicago Nearly one third of severe schizophrenics who were given a new drug improved significantly, but the drug requires weekly blood tests because of a potentially fatal side effect, researchers said recently. The severely affected victims had irreversible, structural brain damage that led researchers to think no drug would ever be able to help them, said Dr Herbert Meltzer, one of the directors of a new study conducted at 16 hospitals throughout the country. “It is a major, major advance,” Dr Meltzer said at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. The findings of the study by Dr Meltzer, of the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and Dr John Kane, of the Long Island Jewish Medical Centre in New York,

were reported for the first time recently. It is estimated that 300,000 Americans have the most severe form of schizophrenia. Many other so-called neuroleptic or antipsychotic drugs are used to treat schizophrenia, and they are all about equally effective, Dr Meltzer said, but are of no value in the most severe cases. “This is the first time in the history of these drugs that any one anti-psy-chotic drug has been shown to be superior to any of the others,” Dr Meltzer said. The drug, called clozapine, was tested on approximately 125 severe schizophrenics in Dr Meltzer’s study. A similar group of schizophrenics were given chlorpromazine, a widely used antipsychotic drug. Clozapine does have a potentially fatal side effect, Dr Meltzer emphasised, but he said no

deaths had occurred from the drug in the United States and that the side effect was reversible if it was detected early and drug treatment stopped. The problem was first noted in Europe, Dr Meltzer said, where clozapine has been under, study since the early 19705. Eight Finnish patients died in 1975, he said, when the drug destroyed white cells crucial to fighting infection. , Dr Meltzer has found that this condition, called, agranulocytosis, can be detected and reversed in time to prevent death if weekly blood counts are taken of patients receiving clozapine. Other anti-psychotic drugs have about a one in 1000 or one in 1500 chance of producing this effect, Dr Meltzer said. With clozapine, the chances of this occurring are about one in 100, he said.