Treatment of schizophrenia patients: comparing new-generation antipsychotics to each other.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Although the debate on whether new antipsychotics have advantages over the old neuroleptics has recently been refueled by the first publication of the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness results, one of the new challenges in the pharmacological management of schizophrenia patients is to choose among the new-generation drugs.

RECENT FINDINGS

Earlier work has compared these medications primarily to traditional antipsychotics and until very recently there was little published information on the relative efficacy/safety of new-generation antipsychotics.

SUMMARY

This review covers studies wherein therapeutic effects and adverse events of these drugs in schizophrenia patients were compared in head-to-head studies and that were published in 2005. Information is clearly more homogenous on the safety profile side, while the available evidence still offers little help for the clinicians' daily struggles to find the optimally effective antipsychotic for an individual schizophrenia patient.