OBJECTIVE This study investigated the prescription patterns for Korean patients with schizophrenia with a particular focus on antipsychotic polypharmacy. All data were gathered from patients presenting at 41 tertiary university hospitals and 8 secondary hospitals. METHODS Data from three multicenter studies conducted in Korea were retrospectively reviewed and integrated to identify patients w...

Several clinical reports have documented a beneficial effect of adding atypical antipsychotic drugs to ongoing treatments with antidepressants, particularly selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, in ameliorating drug-resistant depression. The aim of this paper was to summarize some preclinical evidence describing the mechanism responsible for the therapeutic action of combined treatment with ...

BACKGROUND Effectiveness of antipsychotics in treating emotional and cognitive deficits in schizophrenia still remains controversial. The aim of our study was to assess emotional and cognitive functioning in schizophrenic inpatients currently treated with typical antipsychotics (perphenazine, perazine, fluphenazine, and haloperidol) and in another group of schizophrenic inpatients currently on ...

BACKGROUND Conventional antipsychotic drugs have been implicated as a cause of ventricular arrhythmias and cardiac arrest, but no definitive information is available regarding atypical antipsychotics. We compared the effect of conventional and atypical antipsychotics on the risk of hospitalization for ventricular arrhythmias and cardiac arrest. METHODS We conducted a case-control study on res...

OBJECTIVE Tardive dyskinesia (TD), the principal adverse effect of long-term conventional antipsychotic treatment, can be debilitating and, in many cases, persistent. We sought to explore the incidence and management of TD in the era of atypical antipsychotics because it remains an important iatrogenic adverse effect. METHODS We conducted a review of TD incidence and management literature fro...

neuroleptic malignant syndrome (nms) is a rare but life-threatening idiosyncratic side effect resulting from neuroleptic drugs. nms mainly occurs in patients treated with high-potency typical antipsychotics, but rarely caused by atypical antipsychotics. although nms is less common with atypical antipsychotic, but it seems that its incidence is rising due to increased administration of such drug...

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE According to some cohort studies, the prevalence of refractory schizophrenia (RS) is 20-40%. Our aim was to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of aripiprazole, paliperidone, quetiapine and risperidone for treating RS. METHODS This was a critical appraisal of Cochrane reviews published in the Cochrane Library, supplemented with reference to more recent randomized contr...

Results Anecdotalreports indicate thatconventional and atypical antipsychotics can cause diabetesmellitus. However, retrospective studies cannot reliablyquantify this association, as they do not adequatelycontrol for confounding risk factors fordiabetes, or for variation in detection and diagnosis of this illness.Most studies report a higher rate of diabetes in patientswho use antipsychoticmedi...

Mental illness constitutes the second-largest disease burden in the United States. Psychosis is one of the most common and severe mental illnesses. It is an extremely devastating condition characterised by delusions, hallucinations, distortion of thoughts and deteriorating social functioning experiences. Psychosis in all human societies has approximately same incidence of occurrence as in accor...

Adverse skin reactions are an important type of adverse drug reactions which have been reported with a wide variety of psychotropics including both typical and atypical antipsychotics. Like typical antipsychotics, atypical antipsychotics such as olanzapine, risperidone, and paliperidone have been documented to cause skin reactions. Reports of aripiprazole-induced skin reactions are sparse. We r...