BACKGROUND Users of typical antipsychotic drugs have an increased risk of serious ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death. However, less is known regarding the cardiac safety of the atypical antipsychotic drugs, which have largely replaced the older agents in clinical practice. METHODS We calculated the adjusted incidence of sudden cardiac death among current users of antipsychotic d...

Recently, an increased risk of venous thromboembolism in patients on antipsychotic drugs has been reported, but the molecular etiology is still unknown. Most antipsychotic drugs act as dopamine antagonists, and some of them cause hyperprolactinemia. Hyperprolactinemia has recently been found to cause increased platelet activation via potentiating ADP effects on human platelets. We assessed prol...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated the prescription patterns for Korean patients with schizophrenia with a particular focus on antipsychotic polypharmacy. All data were gathered from patients presenting at 41 tertiary university hospitals and 8 secondary hospitals. METHODS Data from three multicenter studies conducted in Korea were retrospectively reviewed and integrated to identify patients w...

BACKGROUND The introduction of second-generation antipsychotic drugs during the 1990s is widely believed to have adversely affected mortality of patients with schizophrenia. Our aim was to establish the long-term contribution of antipsychotic drugs to mortality in such patients. METHODS Nationwide registers in Finland were used to compare the cause-specific mortality in 66 881 patients versus...

OBJECTIVE Atypical antipsychotic drugs have been shown to protect PC12 cells from cell death induced by a variety of stimuli in culture. Recently, it has been postulated that trophic factors, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), play a role in preventing cell death. It has been shown that antipsychotic drugs attenuate the decrease in rat hippocampal BDNF that results from immobiliz...

BACKGROUND Because of the debate about whether second-generation antipsychotic drugs are better than first-generation antipsychotic drugs, we did a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials to compare the effects of these two types of drugs in patients with schizophrenia. METHODS We compared nine second-generation antipsychotic drugs with first-generation drugs for overall efficacy (main ...

 Introduction: Olanzapine (Zyprexa) has become one of the most commonly prescribed atypical antipsychotic drug in Iran, at least in part due to its low potential to cause extra-pyramidal side effects. Case: A 54-year-old man, who was a known case of schizophrenia from 10 years ago and within the recent years, was under periodic medical treatment by antipsychotic drugs. Conclusion: Neurologi...

Clozapine is the prototype atypical antipsychotic drug, producing little or no extrapyramidal side effects, while improving negative symptoms of psychosis. Clozapine's high affinity for serotonin receptors has been hypothesized to confer the unique antipsychotic properties of this drug. Recently, we demonstrated that both typical and atypical antipsychotic drugs are inverse agonists at constitu...