Importance of the newer generations of antipsychotics in reducing schizophrenia hospitalization rates.

Throughout history, given the lack of understanding of schizophrenia and lack of effective treatment options, patients were often committed to asylums and later psychiatric institutions, often for prolonged periods of time. First antipsychotic medications helped to bring about changes in approach to these patients and facilitated deinstitutionalization, and discovery of new drugs with differing side-effects profiles introduced new options in treating schizophrenia patients. Data on hospitalization of patients in University Psychiatric Hospital Vrapče from the mid-1990s, as well as data on national level, suggests a trend of drop in hospitalization of schizophrenia patients. At the same time, that period saw significant increase in a number of available newer-generations antipsychotics and the rise in their use compared to first-generation one. Although far from being the only contributing factor, seem to play an important role in continuing the trend of reducing hospitalization rates for schizophrenia patients that started with first antipsychotics. Newer antipsychotics with a more tolerable side-effects profile promote better compliance and further reduce rate of relapse and hospitalizations. No less important is the contribution of newer antipsychotics with new receptor profiles to the personalized psychopharmacotherapy approach that is in tune with emerging conceptualizations of schizophrenia as a complex syndrome with a number of separate symptom domains, whose specific combinations produce specific individual clinical presentation and in turn ask for a specific individual approach to the patient.