In this issue of JCP, Cohen et al present the methodology of the National Pregnancy Registry for Atypical Antipsychotics (NPRAA). In full disclosure, the investigators are my colleagues, and I have great interest in the topic of pregnancy registries, including this particular registry, as a perinatal psychiatrist and from a scientific perspective. Highlighting the importance of this paper is in...

The present study was designed to compare the effects of typical and atypical antipsychotic drugs on extracellular dopamine (DA) levels in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the nucleus accumbens (NAC), using in vivo microdialysis with dual probe implantation in awake, freely moving rats. Amperozide (2 and 10 mg/kg), clozapine (5 and 20 mg/kg), and olanzapine (10 mg/kg), all of which are a...

BACKGROUND Psychiatric patients often require chronic treatment with antipsychotic drugs, and while rats are frequently used to study antipsychotic-induced metabolic adverse effects, long-term exposure has only partially mimicked the appetite-stimulating and weight-inducing effects found in the clinical setting. Antipsychotic-induced effects on serum lipids are also inconsistent in rats, but in...

Antipsychotic drugs have been classified as typical or atypical. To achieve an effective antipsychotic effect with typical antipsychotic drugs, e.g. haloperidol, a dopamine D2 receptor blockade of about 70% seems necessary. On the other hand, the prototype for atypical antipsychotic drugs clozapine is clinically effective already at about 45% D2 receptor occupancy. Clozapine possesses affinity ...

Chlorpromazine hydrochloride first became available in Europe and theUnited States in the early 1950s. A large, doubleblind, placebo-controlled trial thatwas conductedwithin the US Veterans Affairs system and included nearly 700 patients (allmenaged≤50years) helped establish its efficacy for treating schizophrenia.1 Theuseof chlorpromazine is creditedwith largedecreases inpsychiatric inpatientp...

Antipsychotic drugs currently in use have been developed as antidopaminergic agents; that is, normalization of psychotic symptoms occurs through a reduction in dopaminergic activity, usually by blockade of postsynaptic dopamine receptors. Based on this current understanding of the mechanism of action of antipsychotic drugs, it is suggested that one physiological role of the dopaminergic system ...

Pharmacological intervention is the commonest mode of managing patients with schizophrenia. Both clinicians and patients are concerned that antipsyohotic drugs are costly and contribute to poor drug compliance in India. This study compared the equivalent doses of antipsychotic drugs and their costs across brands. Results show that antipsychotic drugs are affordable and are comparable to drug tr...

Whether the dopamine Drd-2 receptor is necessary for the behavioural action of antipsychotic drugs is an important question, as Drd-2 antagonism is responsible for their debilitating motor side effects. Using Drd-2 null mice (Drd2 -/-) it has previously been shown that Drd-2 is not necessary for antipsychotic drugs to reverse D-amphetamine disruption of latent inhibition (LI), a behavioural mea...

Extracellular single unit recording techniques were used to study the effects of both acute and repeated oral neuroleptic administration on the in vivo activity of rat A9 and A10 dopaminergic (DA) neurons. All antipsychotic drugs examined acutely (haloperidol, l-sulpiride, chlorpromazine, and clozapine) increased the number of spontaneously firing DA neurons in both A9 and A10 compared to contr...