CATIE Study Helps Clinicians Tailor Schizophrenia Treatment
There is a good article in December's Psychiatric Times on how the CATIE drug comparison trial is impacting clinical drug prescriptions.
The article notes:
While the recent publication of Phase I results of the landmark Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) study enabled pharmaceutical companies and stock pundits to declare winners and losers among the marketed antipsychotics, the big winners may be clinicians who treat the 3.2 million Americans suffering from schizophrenia.
"The results of the CATIE study provide the most comprehensive set of data on the pharmacologic treatment of schizophrenia ever assembled," Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., a Columbia University psychiatrist and lead author of the study, said at a press conference. "These [results] will guide doctors in their selection of treatments and clinical management of individual patients. This is because no study has ever examined all marketed drugs in a controlled fashion for such a long time period using such extensive measures of safety and efficacy, much less the cost data."
Thomas Insel, M.D., director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which sponsored the $44 million study, described it as the largest, longest and most comprehensive independent trial ever done to examine existing therapies for this disease. The 18-month study involved 1,460 participants at 57 different clinical sites in 24 states. The effectiveness or "practical trial" sought to be broadly representative of real-life settings and included patients with physical or other mental health problems in addition to schizophrenia, as well as patients from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds.
For Full Story see: CATIE Phase I Helps Clinicians Tailor Schizophrenia Treatment
Posted by szadmin at January 13, 2006 11:02 AM
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