Do different groups of people with schizophrenia respond differently to different antipsychotics?

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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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Risperidone and aripiprazole: genotype, metabolism and dosage

CYP2D6 genotyping before starting treatment might be valuable in clinical practice for individualising risperidone and aripiprazole treatment.

Dolly Sud writes her debut elf blog on a recent retrospective analysis, which compares dose changes of risperidone and aripiprazole with patients’ individual genotype.

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Antipsychotics for acute treatment of first episode schizophrenia

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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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Risperidone versus placebo for people with schizophrenia

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Joanne Wallace summarises the recent Cochrane systematic review on risperidone versus placebo for schizophrenia, which concludes that the best available evidence does not show that the benefits of risperidone outweigh the harms.

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Antipsychotic efficacy measured by real-world observational study

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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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ITI-007 for schizophrenia

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Murtada Alsaif summarises a recent 4-week long phase II randomised controlled trial of ITI-007 for the treatment of schizophrenia, which contains some positive results for this novel intervention.

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Biological pathways, antipsychotics and schizophrenia

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Murtada Alsaif summarises a small cohort study that uses shotgun mass spectrometry proteomic profiling to unravel the molecular pathways involved with antipsychotic response in people with schizophrenia.

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The antipsychotic drugs don’t work for anorexia nervosa

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Helen Bould appraises a recent meta-analysis of second-generation antipsychotics for anorexia nervosa, which finds that the drugs don’t lead to weight gain or improve eating disorder symptoms. So why are antipsychotics being used in this group of patients?

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The more psychotic you are, the more benefit there is in taking antipsychotics

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John Baker reviews a recent participant-level meta-analysis of six placebo-controlled studies, which looks at the initial severity of schizophrenia and the efficacy of antipsychotics including Olanzapine, Risperidone and Amisulpride.

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Long-acting antipsychotics cost-effective for treatment of schizophrenia, but evidence inconsistent

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Here at Mental Elf HQ we’re expanding our skill set to include economics. Understanding the best way to value health and health care, and improving health outcomes with budget constraints in mind, are the key pastimes of economics elves. We hope to bring you the latest economic evidence in the field of mental health and to [read the full story…]