Murtada Alsaif considers a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the Lancet Psychiatry exploring the response of different subgroups of patients with schizophrenia to different antipsychotic drugs.
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Elwira Lubos writes her debut blog on a recent systematic review with pairwise and network meta-analyses, looking at antipsychotic drugs for the acute treatment of patients with first episode schizophrenia.
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Tracey Roberts examines whether a retrospective observational study accurately investigates the effectiveness of second and first generation antipsychotics.
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Samei Huda mulls over a recent RCT on the effects of older and newer antipsychotics on quality of life in schizophrenia. The study finds a different result to the 10-year old CUTLASS trial; namely that second generation antipsychotics may be superior to first generation antipsychotics in terms of improving quality of life for people with schizophrenia.
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John Baker summarises an updated Cochrane review on ‘as required’ PRN medication regimens for seriously mentally ill people in hospital, which finds no randomised controlled trials that support this widely used intervention.
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Alex Langford summarises a relatively large and pragmatic study, which provides firm evidence that the newer antipsychotic, Paliperidone, is no better at preventing relapse or controlling psychotic symptoms than its decades-old comparator, Haloperidol.
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Schizophrenia is a serious disorder characterised by delusions (including paranoid beliefs and hallucinations) and other symptoms such as blunted affect and reduced motivation. While relatively uncommon (lifetime prevalence is less than 1%), it is associated with serious social impairment (e.g., unemployment, homelessness), which in turn can result in physical health problems. As a result, the [read the full story…]
Antipsychotic medication is the standard treatment for schizophrenia and psychosis in the UK. Given that psychosis is commonly a chronic condition and therefore that medication used to treat it often needs to be taken for several years, getting the medication “right” is important. As I mentioned in my first blog post for the Mental Elf, [read the full story…]
