Medicine: New Tranquillizer

To the fast-swelling ranks of ataraxic (tranquilizing) drugs, another was added last week for patients with relatively mild emotional disorders. Offered hopefully to compete with meprobamate (Miltown or Equanil), runaway bestseller among tranquilizers (TIME, Feb. 27), proclorperazine will be sold on prescription by Philadelphia’s Smith, Kline & French Laboratories under the brand name Compazine.

Used in low doses and for no more than about two weeks, proclorperazine is reported to give prompt tranquility to 86% of patients suffering from anxiety, agitation, agitated depression, tension, confusion, restlessness, senile agitation and alcoholic delirium. It lets patients sleep well at night and (unlike chlorpromazine) does not make them drowsy during the day.

One reason for S.K.F.’s emphasis on small doses was that many patients on high dosage develop symptoms like those of Parkinson’s disease—paralysis agitans. To psychiatrists reporting in Philadelphia last week on their trials of proclorperazine in the back wards of state hospitals, it seemed that the Parkinson signs might be more boon than bane. Using the drug in five to ten times the doses that S.K.F. recommends for office patients, Cincinnati’s Dr. Douglas Goldman saw plenty of Parkinson’s but decided it was a sign that the drug was reaching the nervous system in useful amounts. At New York’s Manhattan State Hospital, Dr. Herman Denber had the same experience, concluded that the supposedly undesirable side effects actually are to be sought for in some types of serious mental illness.