More African Americans With Schizophrenia Could Receive Clozapine Despite Lower White Blood Cell Counts

More African Americans with schizophrenia who are not prescribed the antipsychotic clozapine because of low white blood cell counts could potentially use the drug safely, according to Deanna Kelly, Pharm.D., and Gopal Vyas, D.O.Kelly is the director of the Treatment Research Program at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (pictured left), and Vyas is a psychiatrist at the Treatment Research Center. They spoke yesterday at APA ’s IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference in Chicago.Clozapine has been shown repeatedly to be the best medication for treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Yet Kelly and Vyas explained that African Americans with schizophrenia are much less likely to receive clozapine and more likely to have the medication discontinued because of neutropenia, or low white blood cell counts. Clozapine is known to increase the risk for agranulocytosis —a condition of extremely low white blood cell counts that can be life threatening—and patients using clozapine are required to undergo periodic blood monitoring. Many African-American patients who never received the drug or were taken off it, however, may have benign ethnic neutropenia (BEN), a condition that occurs in about 25% to 50% of people of African ancestry and up to 38% of people of Middle-Eastern descent.Kelly and Vyas said that the standards for determining when a patient has neutropenia have largely been drawn from European Caucasian populations.For instance, up until 2015, the Food and Drug Administr...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: African Americans BEN benign ethnic neutropenia clozapine low blood cell counts. Source Type: research