BACKGROUND Studies have found that antipsychotics and antidepressants are associated with weight gain and obesity, particularly among women and some minority groups. Incarcerated populations (also referred to as offenders, prisoners or inmates) have a high prevalence of mental health problems and 15 % of offenders have been prescribed medications. Despite rates of antidepressant and antipsychot...

In recent years, several guidelines and algorithms have appeared to help clinicians address the issues of best practice in the management of psychiatric disorders. As the standard of care has moved from the use of first-generation antipsychotic medications to the use of atypical antipsychotics in the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, clinicians are faced with the challenge of whe...

BACKGROUND Despite concerns over the potential for severe adverse events, antipsychotic medications remain the mainstay of treatment of behaviour disorders and psychosis in elderly patients. Second-generation antipsychotic agents (SGAs; e.g., risperidone, olanzapine, quetiapine) have generally shown a better safety profile compared to the first-generation agents (FGAs; e.g., haloperidol and phe...

introduction: hyperprolactinemia is a common serious side effect of antipsychotic medications that are currently used in the treatment of patients with schizophrenia. pharmacogenetic approaches offer the possibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers for predicting the risk of this side effect. we investigated a possible relationship between variants (snps) in genes for cytochrome 2d6 (...

OBJECTIVE The authors sought to determine by meta-analysis the efficacy and tolerability of adjunctive atypical antipsychotic agents in major depressive disorder. METHOD Searches were conducted of MEDLINE/PubMed (1966 to January 2009), the Cochrane database, abstracts of major psychiatric meetings since 2000, and online trial registries. Manufacturers of atypical antipsychotic agents without ...

Drug therapies are often used effectively without their underlying mechanism being completely understood. We exploit the literature-based discovery paradigm to investigate these mechanisms and propose a discovery pattern that draws on semantic predications extracted from MEDLINE citations. The use of semantic predications and the discovery pattern provides a way to uncover previously unnoticed ...

CONTEXT Atypical antipsychotic agents (clozapine, olanzapine) have been linked to metabolic effects and acute pancreatitis. CASE REPORT We reviewed the inpatient and outpatient records of three patients who developed acute pancreatitis while being treated with olanzapine. The mean age of the patients was 37.7 years (range 18-54 years, 2 female, 1 male). No alternative cause of acute pancreati...

OBJECTIVE Although antipsychotic polypharmacy is being prescribed with increasing frequency, few studies have described patient characteristics and treatment patterns associated with long-term use of this treatment strategy. METHODS By using data from the National Psychosis Registry of the Department of Veterans Affairs, 5,826 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who receiv...

Posterior reversible cerebral edema syndrome is a generally reversible neurologic condition that is diagnosed based on distinctive clinical and radiologic findings. The condition, which is mostly associated with severe arterial hypertension, has also been reported to be induced by several medications. We made the diagnosis of hypertension with posterior reversible cerebral edema syndrome in a l...

This Practice Parameter reviews the literature on the assessment and treatment of children and adolescents with schizophrenia. Early-onset schizophrenia is diagnosed using the same criteria as in adults and appears to be continuous with the adult form of the disorder. Clinical standards suggest that effective treatment includes antipsychotic medications combined with psychoeducational, psychoth...