Chlorpromazine and Immunologic Considerations of Schizophrenia

Excerpt

To the editor: Phenothiazines have had a well-known salutory impact on the treatment of psychosis. Unfortunately, a large number of schizophrenic patients remain chronically psychotic despite phenothiazine treatment. Assuming an essential similarity of neurochemical pathology, a number of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this refractoriness to drug treatment: noncompliance (1), poor absorption from the gut (2), modified receptor sensitivity (3), and accelerated liver metabolism (4).

Zarrabi and colleagues (5) report an interesting and useful study suggesting a speculation that might shed further light in the problem of phenothiazine resistance in the treatment of schizophrenia. These authors showed a