[20 years experience with chlorprothixene (author's transl)].

Chlorprothixene was the first neuroleptic of the thioxanthene group and was marketed in 1959 under the trade names of Taractan and Truxal. Since then 20 years have passed and the authors were of the opinion that it would be opportune to study the literature published during these 20 years. They perused 801 publications, hereof 542 clinical works. Of these clinical works 109 were suited for statistical analysis. They represented 7109 patients. The other publications comprise 4378 patients which means that all the literature studied consists of a total of 11487 patients. The chlorprothixene proved to be a broad-spectrum neuroleptic with good therapeutic effects. Side effects, especially the extrapyramidal symptoms, appeared only seldom. Among the 11487 patients only 1.02% showed extrapyramidal symptoms and of these only 0.05% had tardive dyskinesias. Sme evidence seems to exist that these are schizophrenic patients showing extrapyramidal symptoms, without having received neuroleptics. It is the authors' opinion that chlorprothixene is still a neuroleptic of topical interest.