The study of the levels of thyroid antibodies was conducted in 58 patients treated with lithium and in 40 subjects who received other psychotropic drugs and who were used as controls. The measure of the antithyroglobulin antibodies was made by passive hemagglutination and that of the antimicrosomal antibodies by indirect immunofluorescence. For the whole control group, the research of the antithyroglobulin antibodies was positive in 3 cases, i.e. 7.5%. For the 58 patients treated with lithium, this research was positive in 11 subjects, i.e. 19%: thus, lithium seems to cause immunological reactions in the thyroid. 5 lithium-treated patients developed a goiter. The antibody determination was positive in only 2 subjects and was negative in the others. The measure of antithyroid antibodies before lithium did not enable us to predict the emergence of thyroid complications. On the contrary, subjects treated with lithium presented significantly high antibody levels without developing clinical thyroid manifestations.

Many authors have stressed the role of serotonin in mood disorders and some aspects of schizophrenia. Cerebral serotonin synthesis depends on the quantity of circulating free tryptophan not bound to albumin. It thus appeared interesting to estimate the two forms of tryptophan by measuring their plasmatic concentration as well as the free/total tryptophan ratio. These evaluations were performed by an automatic spectrofluorimetric method. 19 blood samples were analyzed from normal subjects and 47 from schizophrenic or manic-depressive patients including treated and untreated cases. The only significant differences in the free/total tryptophan ratio were reported in untreated paranoid schizophrenics and in anxiety cases. A dual nosological and symptomatical approach was adopted in the course of attempted correlation with biological data in order to underline the possible role of symptomatic elements common to different diagnoses. The results for melancholia agreed with those reported in the literature (4). In the case of schizophrenia, however, there are only a few reports and no discrimination has been made between untreated and treated patients or between the different types of schizophrenia. The clinical picture is different for paranoid schizophrenia which is the delusive aspect of the disease and for hebephrenic schizophrenia. It seems fairly logical to find opposite results in delusive mania and paranoid schizophrenia compared to melancholia, since delusive mania and paranoid schizophrenia have similar symptomatology which is the opposite of that found in melancholic depression.