Medicine: Big Lift

When the new TB drug, isoniazid, was first used (TIME, March 3), doctors noticed that some patients seemed to get a tremendous lift: they felt wonderful, out of all proportion to any real improvement in their lung condition. With some, this euphoria was so marked that it was a nuisance. But Dr. Albert E. Krieser saw no reason to expect the same sort of trouble when he began using Pyricidin (a brand of isoniazid) at Anoka State Hospital, Minn. His patients were both tuberculous and mental cases; most of them had shown nothing resembling a spiritual lift in years.

After three weeks, Dr. Krieser found that some of the severe mental cases at Anoka were definitely behaving better. By now, Dr. Krieser reports, six patients have improved markedly, twelve moderately, and three slightly, for a total of 21 out of 48 cases treated. There is no relationship between the effect of the drug on a patient’s physical disease and on his mental illness; some show physical improvement, but not mental, while others show the reverse; a few get better both ways.

Nobody knows how isoniazid affects the central nervous system to produce the lift. But Dr. Krieser and his colleagues want to make sure that isoniazid is, as they now believe, better than shock treatment.