Clozapine for the treatment-resistant schizophrenic. A double-blind comparison with chlorpromazine

Kane J.; Honigfeld G.; Singer J.; Meltzer H.

Department of Psychiatry, Hillside Hospital-Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Glen Oaks, NY 11004, USA

The treatment of schizophrenic patients who fail to respond to adequate trials of neuroleptics is a major challenge. Clozapine, an atypical antipsychotic drug, has long been of scientific interest, but its clinical development has been delayed because of an associated risk of agranulocytosis. This report describes a multicenter clinical trial to assess clozapine's efficacy in the treatment of patients who are refractory to neuroleptics. DSM-III schizophrenics who had failed to respond to at least three different neuroleptics underwent a prospective, single-blind trial of haloperidol (mean dosage, 61 ± 14 mg/d) for six weeks. Patients whose condition remained unimproved were then randomly assigned, in a double-blind manner, to clozapine (up to 900mg/d) or chlorpromazne (up to 1800 mg/d) for six weeks. Two hundred sixty-eight patients were entered in the double-blind comparison. When a priori criteria were used, 30% of the clozapine-treated patients were categorized as responders compared with 4% of chlorpromazine-treated patients. Clozapine produced significantly greater improvement on the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, Clinical Global Impression Scale and Nurse's Observation Scale for Inpatient Evaluation; this improvement included 'negative' as well as positive symptom areas. Although no cases of agranulocytosis occurred during this relatively brief study, in our view, the apparently increased comparative risk requires that the use ofclozapine be limited to selected treatment-resistant patients.

Keywords: schizophrenia (link) drug therapy; adult; extrapyramidal symptom (link) side effect; hypotension (link) side effect; salivation; tachycardia (link) side effect; xerostomia (link) side effect; priority journal; major clinical study; human; oral drug administration; side effect

ARCH. GEN. PSYCHIATRY 45/9 (789-796) 1988