This study documents the drug therapy patterns and 1-year treatment costs for 18,833 Medicaid patients with schizophrenia treated with conventional antipsychotic medications in Michigan, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia. One in four patients used no antipsychotic, but had total costs that were less than for treated patients (-$2,576, p < .0001); 18 percent of treated patients delayed therapy for ...

Psychosis is a mental illness of severe type in which the patient loses touch with reality. A person with this problem change in his way of thinking, believing or perceiving and behaving. Since nowadays youngsters are greatly affected by this disease, many Antipsychotic drugs are introduced and used for the treatment. The present review describes information regarding a atypical antipsychotic d...

WARNING Increased Mortality in Elderly Patients with Dementia-Related Psychosis— Elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis treated with antipsychotic drugs are at an increased risk of death. Analyses of seventeen placebo-controlled trials (modal duration of 10 weeks), largely in patients taking atypical antipsychotic drugs, revealed a risk of death in drugtreated patients of between 1.6 ...

Delusions, hallucinations and other psychotic symptoms can accompany a number of conditions in late life. As such, elderly patients are commonly prescribed antipsychotic medications for the treatment of psychosis in both acute and chronic conditions. Those conditions include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and dementia. Elderly patients are at an increased risk of adverse events fro...

The second-generation antipsychotic drug quetiapine (Seroquel) is increasingly being used off-label for treating insomnia in the general population, possibly to avoid standard medications with known addictive qualities and adverse side effects. However, evidence support using it this way scant, associated weight gain other metabolic It must be cautiously appropriate monitoring effects abuse.

Antipsychotic drugs require days of treatment to begin to produce therapeutic effects. We report that in vivo treatment with the antipsychotic drug haloperidol acts with a delay of days to slow spontaneous repetitive firing by isolated midbrain dopamine neurons. The decreased excitability is caused by an increased number of functional A-type K+ channels without any change in gating properties. ...

One of the lesser-known adverse effects of antipsychotic medication is hypothermia, a signifi cant and protracted plunge in body temperature. Known risk factors are older age and exposure to a newfor-the-person antipsychotic drug. Hypothermia impairs cognitive function, often resulting in a delirium that can paradoxically induce the prescription of escalating doses of the offending drug. As hyp...

Antipsychotic monotherapy is strongly recommended in the treatment of schizophrenia. However, antipsychotic polypharmacy (APP) is common in clinical practice, and appears to be related to illness severity and duration, treatment-refractoriness, hospitalization status, duration of hospitalization, geographic region and age. Given the high number of different antipsychotic combinations reported i...

Postsynaptic Neuron Figure 1. Conventional vs. Atypical Antipsychotic Mechanisms n last month’s BRAINSTORMS, we discussed a new hypothesis on the mechanism of action of atypical antipsychotics, namely the “hit-and-run” hypothesis. Here we illustrate this concept. Conventional: Because of the biochemical properties of conventional antipsychotics, their binding to postsynaptic dopamine D2 recepto...

BACKGROUND Although much progress has been made on antipsychotic drug development, precise mechanisms behind the action of typical and atypical antipsychotics are poorly understood. METHODS We performed genome-wide expression profiling to study effects of typical antipsychotics and atypical antipsychotics in the postmortem liver of schizophrenia patients using microarrays (Affymetrix U133 plu...