Aripiprazole compared to typical antipsychotic drugs for schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness which mostly affects people in early adulthood. The symptoms of schizophrenia are perceptions without cause (hallucinations), fixed false beliefs (delusions) and/or apathy, slowing and less movement or thought.
People with this condition are usually treated with antipsychotic medication but there are a significant number who don’t respond, or develop uncomfortable adverse effects when on the drugs available. Aripiprazole is a new medication which acts differently in the brain to other antipsychotics and may benefit people who have been resistant to treatment so far.
This review compares aripiprazole to the older ‘typical’ antipsychotics. The data for nine clinical trials containing a total of 3622 patients were analysed. In the trials of less than twelve weeks that reported improvement of general well-being and mental state, there was no statistically significant difference between typical antipsychotics and aripiprazole. However, when looking at adverse effects, people on aripiprazole were less likely to suffer from movement side effects, blurred vision, high levels of the hormone prolactin or increased heart rate. These people were also less likely to withdraw their consent to being in the study in short (less than twelve weeks) and longer (more than twelve weeks) trials. Conversely, people on typical antipsychotics were significantly less likely to feel dizzy or nauseous.
These trials were all quite different from each other - they had varying settings, enrolled different groups of people, were for several lengths of times (from 24 hours to 52 weeks) and compared aripiprazole to different first generation antipsychotics. This made it difficult to compare outcomes from trial to trial. In addition, a lot of the data were not able to be used because measurements were not given in full. This medication looks promising but there needs to be more trials and which have been well planned and are longer.
