Weight Change During and After Hospital Treatment

Introduction  Several studies in recent years^1-6 have demonstrated that many hospitalized psychotic patients taking phenothiazine drugs gain weight rather rapidly; this results in there being a high percentage of overweight patients in mental hospitals. Planansky¹ concludes that "it is clear that the introduction of tranquilizing treatment on a mass scale has brought an entirely new problem into the wards of mental hospitals—obesity on a mass scale." Investigations of the VA Cooperative Studies in Psychiatry have clearly demonstrated consistent weight gain by hospitalized patients taking various phenothiazine drugs.^2,3,4 The most widely used phenothiazine in mental hospitals, chloropromazine, caused the largest weight gains; individual gains with this drug averaged about seven or eight pounds in the first three months for groups of hospitalized psychotic patients.³My colleagues and I⁵ have found that functionally psychotic patients taking phenothiazines at