Long-acting Antipsychotics: Better Efficacy in Some Outcomes for Schizophrenia

Treatment of schizophrenia with long-acting injectable antipsychotic agents resulted in significantly lower rates of rehospitalization compared with oral formulations, according to results of a large, prospective, Scandinavian follow-up study published in the July issue of JAMA Psychiatry. Treatment failures in the study were lowest with injectable clozapine and highest with olanzapine, the most common oral antipsychotic.

A team of investigators from multiple institutions in Sweden and Finland assembled a prevalence cohort from the entire Swedish population of 29,823 individuals aged 16 to 64 years who were diagnosed with schizophrenia between July 2006 and December 2013, as well as an incident cohort that included a subset of 4603 patients diagnosed with a first episode of schizophrenia. During a mean follow-up of 5.7 years, 43.7% of patients in the prevalence cohort were rehospitalized, and 71.7% experienced treatment failure.

http://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/schizophrenia-and-psychoses/schizophrenia-injectable-antipsychotics-improved-outcomes/article/680887/

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I didn’t know long acting clozapine existed.

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