Antipsychotic drugs for prevention of relapse

摘要

In The Lancet, Stefan Leucht and colleagues summarise 50 years of evidence and show that antipsychotic drugs reduce the rate of relapse in patients with schizophrenia at 1 year (risk ratio 0.40, 95% Cl 0.33-0.49). This finding is consistent with a previous report, in which the authors stated that psychiatric drugs have similar efficacy to most general medical drugs. The present review breaks a trend, because systematic re-evaluations in the past 2 years have cast doubt on the perceived effectiveness of both pharmacological (eg, antidepressant drugs) and non-pharmacological treatments (eg, cognitive behavioural therapy in depression) in psychiatry, in the sense that cheaper and less complex treatments might be as effective, orthat effects apply to subgroups of patients only.