Early Treatment Impact Difficult to Track
Posted on: Monday, 1 May 2006, 21:00 CDT
U.S. researchers say preemptive treatment for patients at risk for schizophrenia is more difficult and riskier than they had hoped.
Experts say the first long-term trial of early drug treatment, financed by Eli Lilly and the National Institute of Mental Health, raised more questions than it answered, The New York Times reported.
The findings were published Monday in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
Psychiatric researchers in recent years have been prescribing antipsychotic drugs to patients at risk for schizophrenia who have not yet developed the full-blown disorder in the hope that it will ward off or even prevent psychosis, the newspaper said.
While daily doses of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, from Eli Lilly, blunted symptoms in many patients and lowered their risk of experiencing a psychotic episode in the first year of treatment, the drug also caused significant weight gain, the study said. Also, so many participants dropped out of the study that investigators could not draw firm conclusions about drug benefits, the newspaper said.
Source: United Press International
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