EFFECTS OF CAFFEINE PRETREATMENT ON MEASURES OF SEIZURE IMPACT

Caffeine lengthens electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) seizures but has no t been demonstrated to lower seizure threshold, nor to directly improv e treatment outcome. We examined the effects of caffeine upon three re cently proposed physiologic measures of seizure quality or impact: ele ctroencephalography voltage suppression ratios, seizure regularity, an d heart rate. None of these measures differed significantly in depress ed inpatients randomly pretreated with either i.v. caffeine or saline on successive treatments during a course of right unilateral ECT. Newl y defined measures of seizure impact may help identify ECT seizures of differing clinical efficacy, but these measures did not discriminate our caffeine and placebo conditions.