Long-acting antipsychotic medication may improve treatment for schizophrenia

Schizophrenia, which affects 2 million to 3 million people in the U.S., causes hallucinations, delusions and disorganization. Left untreated, the disease can cause a significant loss in quality of life, including unemployment and estrangement from loved ones. But many people with schizophrenia can control the disorder and live without symptoms for several years if they consistently take prescribed antipsychotic medication, typically a daily pill. The problem is that many people don’t continue taking their medication once their symptoms improve. Now, a UCLA study has found that people who took a long-acting injectable form of risperidone — one given every two weeks — had a substantially lower risk for the symptoms returning than people who took the daily medication as a pill. The study, which will be published June 24 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, concluded that doctors should consider prescribing the long-lasting injectable medication much earlier in the course of treatment than they typically do today. “We know that not taking antipsychotic medication is the single greatest modifiable risk factor for psychotic symptoms returning,” said Kenneth Subotnik, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the study’s first author, adding that patients who have only recently developed the disease are especially susceptible to not taking their medication daily. Although long-acting medications have been around sin...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news