Chat Topic:
Pharmacotherapy of treatment-resistant schizophrenia: evidence base and clinical challenges
Invited guest author: Stefan Leucht, Professor of Psychiatry and Vice chairman at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy TU-München & Honorary Professor of Evidence-based Psychopharmacology, University of Aarhus.
A significant number of patients with schizophrenia do not respond adequately to an initial antipsychotic trial. What to do next? In case of treatment resistance, two strategies that are often used in clinical routine care contain dose increase of the current administered antipsychotic drug (dose escalation, high-dose treatment) and switch to another, new antipsychotic. According to available evidence, what approach should be preferred? Is it true that, after treatment failure with at least two different antipsychotic drugs, a monotherapy with clozapine is considered to be the treatment option of first choice? Which is the evidence in favour of combination treatment of two antipsychotics? What about augmentation of antipsychotics with other pharamcological agents?
These are some of the main questions that clinicians and patients face daily in clinical practice and these are the questions we will specifically address and answer during the tweet chat.
http://blogs.bmj.com/ebmh/2014/10/03/ebmhchat-pharmacotherapy/