BACKGROUND In 2002, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), recommended atypical antipsychotics over conventional ones for first-line schizophrenia treatment, based on their lower risk of extrapyramidal symptoms. OBJECTIVE To estimate the incremental cost-effectiveness of atypical relative to conventional antipsychotics for the treatment of schizophrenia in the UK. ...

Atypical antipsychotics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have been prescribed extensively, often in combination with each other. When toxic encephalopathy develops with neuromuscular and autonomic symptoms in a patient taking medication including atypical antipsychotics, it has tended to be diagnosed as neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS). However, there have recently been s...

Tardive dyskinesia (TD) is a disfiguring side-effect of antipsychotic medications that is potentially irreversible in affected patients. Newer atypical antipsychotics are felt by many to have a lower risk of TD. As a result, many clinicians may have developed a false sense of security when prescribing these medications. We report five cases of patients taking atypical antipsychotics who develop...

Atypical antipsychotic medications are widely used for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Most empirical support suggests that these medications are efficacious in the treatment of acute mania, but there is considerably less support for the utility of these drugs in other phases of bipolar disorder. However, it is likely that several of these drugs will demonstrate efficacy in relapse preventio...

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to investigate routine administrative data from a major German health insurance fund, Techniker Krankenkasse, which covers 5.4 million insured individuals. Using a retrospective cohort design, this study analysed data collected from patients with a hospital diagnosis of schizophrenia in 2003 (index hospitalisation) in order to evaluate prescription pattern...

OBJECTIVE In the light of the recent finding that the atypical antipsychotics clozapine and olanzapine have a stimulatory effect on basal insulin release in vitro, the influence on insulin release of three other atypical agents; quetiapine, risperidone and ziprasidone, was examined. METHODS The effect of each atypical antipsychotic in a concentration of 10(-6) M was investigated on both basal...

Reports of diabetes, diabetic ketoacidosis, hyperglycemia, and dyslipidemias in patients treated with atypical antipsychotics have increased in recent years. This increase has led to growing concern about a possible link between these metabolic effects and atypical antipsychotic therapy. This review article provides an overview of the evidence for an association between glucose and lipid dysreg...

BACKGROUND Atypical antipsychotic agents are thought to be less likely than older typical agents to produce parkinsonism. This has not been well documented. We compared the risk of development of incident parkinsonism among older adults dispensed atypical relative to typical antipsychotics. METHODS Retrospective cohort study of all adults 66 years and older in Ontario. We used Cox proportiona...

OBJECTIVE This study compared the efficacy and tolerability of aripiprazole with that of other atypical antipsychotics by examining patients with pediatric bipolar disorder (PBD) at a child and adolescent psychiatric clinic in a university hospital in Korea. METHODS We reviewed the medical records of 127 pediatric patients with bipolar disorder aged 4-18 years treated at Department of Child a...

The objective of this review is to summarize the data about metabolic side effects of atypical antipsychotics in children. Original research articles about side effects of atypical antipsychotics used in children were reviewed. The data was obtained mainly through Medline searches, identifying articles focusing on the use of atypical antipsychotics in children. Forty studies that addressed the ...