The field of schizophrenia drug treatment is fraught with debate, controversies and confusion. Depot or long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAIAs) strategy in relapse prevention is not an exemption (see Kane et al. 2013). Antipsychotics are the mainstay of the successful long term treatment of patients with
schizophrenia. There are four main reasons to initiate antipsychotic drug treatment:
- to treat the presenting psychotic symptoms; 2. to prevent relapse;
- to delay or prevent the florid onset of schizophrenia or psychotic disorder, and 4. to intervene as soon as schizophrenia or psychosis develops, in order to improve the overall
outcome. Bringing the prodromal or acute phase of schizophrenia into remission as soon as possible and preventing the relapse is crucial to obtain personal recovery and maintain well-being for patients and their families. The advent of a significant number of effective
and well tolerated antipsychotic drugs has increased our possibilities to treat schizophrenia and other delusional disorders in more successful ways with much better
treatment outcome including full recovery. However, in clinical practice there is a huge gap between possi-bilities for achieving high treatment effectiveness and poor results in reality. One of the major reasons is the non-adherence to drug treatment which continues to be a significant problem and high costly issue, with all three generations of antipsychotic medications. LAIAs were developed in order to improve treatment adherence
and possibly prevent relapse in patients with schizo-phrenia
http://www.hdbp.org/psychiatria_danubina/pdf/dnb_vol26_no4/dnb_vol26_no4_304.pdf
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