SY N OP S I S A study was conducted on 66 psychiatric inpatients who took major tranquilizers for periods of four to 16 years. The frequency of signs of Parkinsonism and the effects of orphenadrine on these were studied in a double-blind crossover method. Sixty-one per cent of the patients showed signs of Parkinsonism. Female patients and those with organic brain pathology more frequently exhibited Parkinsonism (although the difference was not statistically significant). No correlation was found between duration of treatment and extrapyramidal effects. Of the 40 patients who developed Parkinsonism, 25 responded favourably to orphenadrine, while six (15%) had more marked manifestations on orphenadrine than on placebo.Although phenothiazines have been widely used in psychiatry for approximately 20 years, there is relatively little information concerning many aspects of their chronic administration. The recognition of persistent orofacial dyskinesia as a syndrome connected with prolonged treatment with these drugs raises the possibility of irreversible toxic effects on the brain, particularly the extrapyramidal system (Korczyn, 1972). There have been suggestions that the Parkinsonism effects, frequently observed with these drugs, might become irreversible after prolonged treatment (McGeer et al., 1961) or, conversely, disappear (Cahan andParish, 1960;Mandell and Oliver, 1961). The ideal way to answer this question-that is, to follow up patients maintained on the same dosage of neuroleptic drugs for several years-is not practical, and available information in the literature deals almost exclusively with the effects of relatively short periods of treatment. We have tried to approach the problem by measuring the extrapyramidal side-effects in patients treated with antipsychotic drugs for long periods, and correlating these manifestations with various parameters. In addition we have measured the protection offered by 1 Present address: Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel. (Accepted 21 April 1976.) orphenadrine against the extrapyramidal manifestations. It has been claimed that with prolonged treatment in Parkinson's disease orphenadrine loses efficacy (Strang, 1965), but there is no information concerning the effects of prolonged treatment in drug-induced Parkinsonism.
METHODSThe population under study consisted of 66 psychiatric patients. These were among the 228 patients in seven long-stay wards at Goodmayes Hospital, Ilford, Essex. The rest of the patients in these wards had not been on major tranquillizers at the time of examination, or the dosage was not kept constant for any length of time before initiation of the study. The drugs used were chlorpromazine, thioridazine, trifluoperazine, fluphenazine, and haloperidol. The most common diagnosis was schizophrenia, either simple or paranoid.The patients were examined carefully neurologically, and special attention was given to the following signs and symptoms: hypokinesia, rigidity, trem...