Abstract
Hospitalized schizophrenic patients, whose acute psychiatric signs had been relieved, were daily treated either with nitrazepam or nitrazepam plus one neuroleptic drug just before their bedtimes, and the continuous administration of nitrazepam on chronic psychiatric symptoms was followed up for a 8-week period by the open trial method.
Seventeen subjects completed the full 8-week treatment period, their mean ages and mean durations of the illness and hospitalization being 36.5 years, 13 years and 7 months and 3 years and 3 months, respectively. The mean duration period of nitrazepam was 2 years.
Of the seventeen patients, twelve showed occasional insomnia when nitrazepam was replaced by placebo. The global judgement of the psychiatric symptoms at the end of 8-week study gave the following results; symptomatic“improvement”was observed in two patients (11.8%), “slight improvement”in three (17.6%), “no change”in eleven (64.7%) and“deterioration”in one. A comparative analysis between the improved and the unimproved group revealed that significant clinical factors involved in the former group were younger ages (>30 years), short-term hospitalization (>1 year) or relatively short duration of treatment (>3 months) with a daily dose of 5mg/day of nitrazepam. However, there could be detected no significant changes on individual items for the psychiatric symptoms throughout the 8-week study.
