A comparative study of three hypnotics: methyprylon, glutethimide and chloral hydrate.

A controlled study designed to evaluate the hypnotic potentiality of methyprylon (300 mg.), glutethimide (500 mg.) and chloral hydrate (1000 mg.) was carried out on 50 in-patients experiencing long-standing insomina. The patients ranged in age from 21 to 60 years, the sexes were equally represented and the clinical diagnoses were psychoneurosis, reactive depression, or anxiety reaction. An interesting feature of the experimental design allowed for the exclusion of placebo reactors before the initiation of the main trials. No difference in effectiveness of maintaining sleep could be established among the three hypnotic agents, indicating that at the usual levels of statistical significance, all three agents were equally effective as hypnotics. However, a significant trend (P = .05) was found for methyprylon (Noludar) to be the most effective and chloral hydrate to be the least effective of the three drugs in maintaining sleep. Methyprylon was found statistically (P = .05) to be the fastest sleep-inducing agent, whereas glutethimide (Doriden) proved to be the slowest of the three hypnotics with respect to sleep induction time.