Serum prolactin and tardive dyskinesia.

The authors correlated the serum prolactin levels of 19 men with tardive dyskinesia, 29 postmenopausal women with tardive dyskinesia, and 21 men without tardive dyskinesia with the variables age, sex, antipsychotic dosage, and severity of illness. All subjects were taking antipsychotic medication. The prolactin levels of the 14 women with severe tardive dyskinesia were significantly higher than those of the 15 women with mild symptoms. The prolactin levels of the 8 men with severe tardive dyskinesia did not differ from those of the 11 men with mild symptoms. The authors discuss the sex-related association between prolactin and severity of tardive dyskinesia in the context of recent animal studies that have examined the effect of prolactin and estrogens on the striatum.