Youth Taking Antipsychotics Not at Increased Risk of Death

Physically healthy youth aged 5 to 17 years who begin taking antipsychotics for conditions that do not involve psychosis appear to be at no greater risk of death than those initiating other medications. This was one of several findings of arecent article inJAMA Psychiatry.“Antipsychotic medications have potentially life-threatening cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, sedative, and other adverse effects in both children and adults, although many of these are infrequent,” wrote Wayne A. Ray, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and colleagues. “ This finding suggests that antipsychotic medication–related fatalities are rare in healthy children without psychosis.”Ray and colleagues used the Medicaid Analytic Extract, a national repository of data from the Medicaid and Children ’s Health Insurance Program, to identify all individuals aged 5 to 24 without psychosis who initiated antipsychotic treatment between January 2004 and September 2013. Individuals diagnosed with a serious medical illness in the past year were excluded from the analysis. The researchers divided thes e patients into low- and high-dose antipsychotic groups, using 100 chlorpromazine mg daily or equivalent as the cutoff.As a control group, the researchers identified similarly aged patients who began taking alternatives to antipsychotics for such conditions as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, or disruptive behaviors, including antidepressants or lithium.A total o...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: antipsychotics attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder depression disruptive behaviors JAMA Psychiatry psychosis risk of death Vanderbilt University Wayne Ray Source Type: research