Study Shows Benefits of Long-Term Antipsychotic Use for Patients With Schizophrenia

Long-term antipsychotic use is associated with substantially decreased mortality compared with no antipsychotic use, especially among patients treated with clozapine, according to areport inWorld Psychiatry, the journal of the World Psychiatric Association.Moreover, long ‐term antipsychotic use does not increase the likelihood that a patient will experience severe illness leading to hospitalization, wrote Heidi Taipale, Ph.D., of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and colleagues.People with schizophrenia have a shorter average life expectancy than the general population. Taipale and colleagues wanted to know if these differences may be partly due to adverse effects associated with antipsychotics, such as weight gain.They used data from a Finnish national registry on 62,250 patients treated for schizophrenia between 1972 and 2014. Specifically, they analyzed the association between periods of antipsychotic use and no antipsychotic use with hospitalization and/or death.Hospitalization was classified as either “somatic” hospitalization (all hospitalizations except psychiatric and cardiovascular hospitalizations) or “cardiovascular” hospitalization. Three causes of death were analyzed: all‐cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and suicide death.There was no increased risk of somatic or cardiovascular hospitalization associated with periods of antipsychotic use compared with periods of non-use. Cardiovascular deaths, suicide deaths, and all ‐cause deaths were si...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: antipsychotics death Heidi Taipale hospitalization long-term use schizophrenia side effects suicide World Psychiatry Source Type: research