[Dihydroergotoxine mesylate in the treatment of senile cerebral insufficiency. Result of a long-term multicenter double-blind clinical trial with a placebo].

Many controlled double-blind clinical trials against placebo and other drugs have clearly demonstrated the activity of dihydroergotoxine mesylate (DHT) on some symptoms of chronic senile cerebral insufficiency (CSCI). In spite of this, there is still some controversy about the usefulness of DHT for treatment of CSCI, as it seems to be hard to transpose the results of these studies to treatment of a population with DHT. Trying to overcome this criticism, a multicenter double-blind, placebo-controlled long-term (1 year) clinical trial has been planned, using very simple criteria for patient selection and easy to use assessment devices. Fifty two centres distributed throughout Italy were invited and 40 took active part in the study. The present report deals with data collected for analysis on Aug. 31, 1982. On this date 559 patients entered the study and 458 were under treatment (229 on DHT 1.5 mg t.i.d. and 229 on placebo). 101 patients dropped out (48 on DHT and 53 on placebo). 388 patients (195 on DHT and 193 on placebo) had completed 6 months and 204 (111 on DHT and 93 on placebo) had completed 1 year of treatment. The data from patients who completed 6 and 12 months of treatment period were analyzed statistically using Student t tests for paired and unpaired data, the large number of patients being adequate protection against any non normality in the distribution of the data. Differences with 2P values of 0.01 or less were considered significant.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)