THE female sex hormone oestrogen could help people with schizophrenia recover
from psychotic episodes, an Australian psychiatrist has discovered.
Schizophrenia strikes roughly one in a hundred men and women. Those affected
can suffer hallucinations, delusions and jumbled thoughts. Antipsychotic drugs
such as risperidone help some patients, but many remain severely afflicted.
Jayashri Kulkarni, a psychiatrist at the Dandenong Psychiatry Research Centre
in Melbourne, treated 12 women experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia with
oestrogen skin patches and risperidone for one month. The dose of oestrogen was
roughly twice as high as the dose found in common contraceptive pills.
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Compared with 12 similar women who received only risperidone, patients taking
oestrogen performed better on a standard test for judging the severity of
schizophrenia. “Several patients [in the oestrogen group] went from having
terrible voices and hallucinations to that subsiding over a few days. That was
very striking,” says Kulkarni. “With antipsychotic drugs you may get an initial
sedative effect, but you are usually waiting for seven days or more for the full
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“There’s a real interest in finding treatments that augment antipsychotic
drugs,” says John McGrath, director of the Queensland Centre for Schizophrenia
Research in Brisbane. “It’s very promising.” Kulkarni and her colleagues will
publish their results in an upcoming issue of Schizophrenia Research.
In future trials, they will test how long the effect lasts.
Researchers have suspected for a while that oestrogen helps protect against
schizophrenia, because women suffer a milder version of the disease than men and
it usually strikes them later in life. Studies in animals suggest that oestrogen
alters the activity of dopamine and serotonin, two brain chemicals that are
disrupted in schizophrenia.