n abnormally prolongedQT interval is associated with an increased risk of sudden cardiac death. ASome professional bodies recommend national population-based screening programs to detect QT prolongation. Familial long QT syndrome (LQTS) may remain undetected because of misdiagnosis (eg, as a seizure disorder) or through failure to measure the QT interval correctly. Psychiatrists fear the QT pro...

OBJECTIVES To describe and compare temporal changes in prevalence and incidence of psychotropic use (antipsychotics, antidepressants and benzodiazepines and related drugs; BZDRs) in persons with newly diagnosed Alzheimer's disease (AD) between university hospital districts of Finland during 2005-2011. METHODS The MEDALZ study includes all community-dwellers of Finland who received a clinicall...

BACKGROUND There is evidence that medical students are more aware of the benefits of psychotropic treatment than are members of the general public, and that the more knowledge students acquire about psychiatry and pharmacology, the more favorable their attitudes become towards psychotropic drugs and other treatments. OBJECTIVES This study among students investigates the relationship between c...

OBJECTIVE To describe, analyze, and interpret patterns of psychotropic drug prescribing in new psychiatric patients attending psychiatric outpatient clinics in the Caribbean island of Trinidad. DESIGN AND METHODS This was a cross-sectional study of psychotropic drug prescribing by psychiatrists for 132 new psychiatric outpatients who were seen at the outpatient clinics surveyed and who were e...

The efficacy of psychotropic drugs varies depending on the time of administration. This phenomenon is observed with antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and psychostimulants. The presence or absence of this phenomenon and the rhythm phase in the efficacy of each drug varies depending on the drug, dose, parameter measured, animal species, and strain. ...

OBJECTIVE We examined how psychotropic medications affected quantitative EEG (qEEG) results among patients with a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. METHODS The drugs were clustered into nine groups depending on their mechanism. We hypothesized that drugs would affect the relative power shown in qEEG results independently and investigated the effect of each drug group on relative power using mu...

Emerging evidence indicates that treatment context profoundly affects psychopharmacological interventions. We review the evidence for the interaction between drug application and the context in which the drug is given both in human and animal research. We found evidence for this interaction in the placebo response in clinical trials, in our evolving knowledge of pharmacological and environmenta...