Clozapine이 흰쥐의 血液과 骨髓 및 肝組織에 미치는 影響

Effects of Clozapine on the Peripheral Blood, Bone Marrow and Liver in Rats

Clozapine, which has a superior therapeutic effect on psychotic symptoms resistant to the classical antipsychotics，has been limited in its clinical use due to its high incidence of agranulocytosis. In some foreign countries, however, clozapine is being approved for its effective application based on appropriate clinical guidelines derived from the results of various researches. Yet, in our country, this is still in the stage o f preliminary clinical experiments with other related researches not well on the way. Thus the authors conducted a study of clozapine’s effects, with animals as subjects, on peripheral blood, bone marrow and liver tissue, to come up with basic information concerning the side effects o f clozapine. Rats were divided into three groups to be injected with clozapine, haloperidol and normal saline (control) for 28 days. The peripheral blood, bone marrow and liver tissue from each group were studied to obtain the following results. 1) In peripheral blood, the group with clozapine showed increased leukocytes and decreased platelets while the one with haloperidol showed no significant change compared with the control. 2) In bone marrow, both the groups with clozapine and haloperidol were observed without much difference from the control. 3) In histological changes of the liver tissue, the clozapine group was infiltrated with inflammatory cells around the portal area while the haloperidol group showed minimal infiltration, with no change in the control. In this study, the most observable change is thrombocytopenia which is known to have rare incidence am ong the blood dyscrasia with clozapine in hum ankind. From the fact that no significant changes were found in hematopoietic cells including megakaryocytes, this study indicates the possibility of the cause of thrombocytopenia as due to immune mechanism rather than toxic mechanism. In consideration of the limit of the method adopted in this study, however, further complementary studies are required for a concrete clarification of clozapineinduced thrombocytopenia.