The British Journal of Psychiatry 129: 486-489 (1976)
© 1976 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
The HLA system and the clinical response to treatment with chlorpromazine
E Smeraldi, L Bellodi, E Sacchetti and CL Cazzullo
A group of 33 schizophrenic patients were typed for HLA-SD antigens and
their qualitative clinical responses to chlorpromazine therapy determined.
A highly significant positive correlation was found between response to
chlorpromazine and HLA-AI positive, while HLA-A2 positive subjects showed a
significant negative correlation to chlorpromazine treatment. In a second
group of 17 patients the clinical response to chlorpromazine were evaluated
quantitatively, by WPRS, in HLA-AI positive and HLA-AI negative patients.
There were no pre-treatment differences in the scores. After treatment the
scores of positive patients were significantly lower, indicating that they
responded to a greater degree. Since the frequency of HLA-AI in hebephrenic
patients is higher than that in other schizophrenics this may explain our
earlier finding that hebephrenics, as a group, respond better to
chlorpromazine than do other schizophrenics.