The Vanderbilt physician who in the late 1980s established the antipsychotic drug clozapine as the gold standard for treating patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia has improved on his own research.

Herbert Meltzer, M.D., director of the Schizophrenia Program in the Department of Psychiatry, and colleagues have shown that the success of clozapine in treating this population was not due to the unique pharmacologic features of the drug itself, but the fact that it was used at higher doses than what is used to treat patients with schizophrenia who respond well to antipsychotic drugs. Clozapine is rarely used for the 70 percent of patients whose psychotic symptoms respond well to a wide array of other antipsychotic drugs. [continue reading…]