Current Status of Pharmacotherapy in Schizophrenia

Abstract

Various methods have been devised for the accurate evaluation of the effects of psychotropic drugs, and many investigations have been performed. In Japan a growing tendency has been noticed in the following three directions: 1. the devising of more objective rating scales in evaluating mental status. 2. cooperation of many medical schools and psychiatric hospitals. 3. organization of cooperative teams of psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, nurses, occupational therapists, and psychiatric social workers.In the past 3 years 11 university clinics and about 30 related hospitals in Japan have cooperated in trying to find out the most practical and most accurate method for the evaluation of the effects of psychotropic drugs. The present report contains a preliminary results of cooperative studies on this subject among the psychiatric departments of the University of Tokyo, Tokyo Medical College and Tokyo Medical and Dental University. MATERIAL AND METHODSNinety chronic schizophrenic patients, who had been chronically institutionalized in spite of various treatments, were used. 30 patients were randomly selected in each of the three hospitals as shown on Fig. 1, and four psychotropic drugs were administered using the double-blind placebo method on the patients strictly following the same order and dates. The average ages of the patients were between 34 and 35, and the average duration of the course of illness was 9-10 years, showing practical homogeneity in these three groups. In each series of medication 20% of the patients were given placeboes.And an interval fo 1 to 4 months without medication was placed between each series of medication. After the initial one month period of control observation, a 2 month chlorpromazine series (CP) was started under a standard schedule using up to a maximum