Brain's Opiate

It can help schizophrenics

In little more than 20 years, the population of U.S. mental hospitals has been cut from 560,000 to 170,000, and a million or more patients have been restored to bearable, often productive life. This mental-health revolution was brought about by a group of drugs, mostly phe-nothiazines (best-known: Thorazine). But like all potent medications, these have severe long-term side effects in some patients (for example: muscular spasms of the tongue, mouth or limbs).

Two of the men who introduced drug treatment for mental illness into North America, Dr. Nathan S. Kline, director of New York's Rockland Research Institute, and Dr. Heinz Lehmann of Montreal's McGill University, now report highly promising results with a substance that occurs naturally in the human body.

The substance is beta-endorphin, classed as a hormone, tested by medical researchers as a painkiller and hailed as "the brain's own opiate." Actually it originates in the pituitary gland but seems to exert its effects in the brain. Because camels have a notoriously high tolerance for pain, the University of California's master hormonologist, Choh Hao Li, imported more than 500 camel pituitaries from Iraq and identified and synthesized the active segment--beta-endorphin--of a larger molecule he had identified in 1965.

Kline and Lehmann first thought beta-endorphin might be most effective against depression, but tried it on schizophrenics with auditory hallucinations and victims of severe neuroses. So far, they have treated only 14 patients with a total of 40 injections because the cost is forbidding: $3,000 for one 10-mg. dose. But the effects in treatment-resistant patients have been startlingly good, sometimes lasting for weeks. Schizophrenics have stopped hearing voices, and most patients were, at least temporarily, partially restored to their preillness personalities.

Beta-endorphin works best when patients are taken off phenothiazines. But the average dose of phenothiazines and similar medications costs only a few dollars a week, so these will probably remain the primary treatment until an inexpensive synthesis of beta-endorphin or a comparable substance is achieved.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.