03 September 2002

Researchers from the US find that the dynamic nature of pharmacotherapy for schizophrenia makes it important for both conventional and atypical antipsychotics to be included in drug formularies.

Douglas Leslie (Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut) and Robert Rosenheck (Veteran's Affairs Connecticut Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center, West Haven, Connecticut) looked at how the newer atypical antipsychotics, clozapine, risperidone, olanzapine, and quetiapine, have been "diffused" in a national healthcare system.

Of 27,323 patients, 12,440 received conventional antipsychotics, 7649 received risperidone, 6613 were prescribed clozapine, and the remaining 621 took quetiapine.

Patients who had stable prescriptions of clozapine were the least likely to be switched (18%), while patients receiving quetiapine were the most likely to be sw>Early Schizophrenia Screening Test

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