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Nursing home personnel must often manage the disruptive behaviors of elderly cognitively impaired patients. This double-blind, crossover study compared the effects of a neuroleptic and a benzodiazepine, two drug classes commonly used for this purpose.
The subjects were 48 nursing home patients (mean age, 83) with various organic mental disorders. At baseline, all subjects had been receiving haloperidol (1 mg or less daily) for agitation and other behavioral disturbances. All patients then received six-week courses of their usual haloperidol dose (given twice daily) or alprazolam (0.5 mg twice daily), given in random order. Numbers of disruptive episodes were the same with the two drugs (mean, 7 per week). There were also no important differe…