Clozapine in the treatment of schizophrenic patients: an international multicenter trial.

One hundred twenty schizophrenic patients were treated with clozapine for two months in accordance with a standard trial protocol at ten research centers in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and in the GDR. The daily dose ranged from 50 mg to 550 mg (mean: 272.1 mg for responders; 298 mg for nonresponders).

[Clinico-pharmacokinetic aspects of the optimization of psychopharmacotherapy].

One of the main problems of psychopharmacotherapy is high variability of therapeutic effects. The traditional clinical approach to the optimization of psychopharmacotherapy based on the characterization of the spectrum of drug action and individual characteristics of the disease has certain limitations. When the clinical approach is supplemented with pharmacokinetic measurements it becomes possible to specify the choice of drug and to select an individual regimen of administration ensuring an effective level of active forms of the drug in the blood.

[Clinico-pharmacokinetic prediction of the efficacy of treatment: the test dose].

To help individual prediction of the therapy efficacy, the authors elaborated a new method for analyzing the response of the clinical and pharmacokinetic parameters to the pre-treatment administration of the test dose of a psychotropic drug. The above approach was employed in a multicentre clinical-pharmacokinetic study of leponex ( clozapin ) which involved ten research centers from six countries and a total of 136 patients. On the basis of the clinical and pharmacokinetic parameters, a cumulative index was obtained and its prediction potentialities were established.

[International clinico-pharmacokinetic study of individual predictions of the therapeutic effect of leponex (methodology and organization)].

Multicentre international studies make it possible to amass rapidly and reliably the necessary amount of representative data allowing for the verification of the results obtained by different scientific schools. They also represent the most effective approach to the search for attaining the mutual understanding among specialists of different scientific schools and for the elaboration of uniform clinical outlooks . Guidelines were developed to be adhered to while organizing and conducting multicentre psychopharmacological studies.

[Effect of medical treatment on the antithymic activity of schizophrenic patients' serum].

In 16 schizophrenic patients treated with aminazin changes of the serum antithymic activity (ATA) were studied in relation to the drug pharmacokinetics and peculiarities of the patients' psychic status. It was found that in a part of the patients the serum ATA level sharply fell immediately after the treatment onset; the psychopathological disturbances in these patients were reduced, and the patients developed remissions of a good quality. In another part of the patients the high serum ATA remained unchanged throughout the whole observation period.