Antidepressants as add-on treatment to antipsychotics for people with schizophrenia and pronounced negative symptoms: A systematic review of randomized trials

Polypharmacy With Antipsychotics, Antidepressants, or Benzodiazepines and Mortality in Schizophrenia

“…1 It is unknown if the use of antidepressants or benzodiazepines has beneficial net effects in the treatment of schizophrenia; therefore, no conclusions on their use exist in treatment guidelines. [2][3][4] The overall effectiveness of such treatments can be studied by analyzing allcause mortality because efficacy (as life-years gained) and tolerability (as lifeyears lost) contribute to the total mortality among patients. This issue has been reported in 2 publications that link nationwide databases of hospital treatment, medication prescriptions, and mortality registers.…”

More evidence on additive antipsychotic effect of adjunctive mirtazapine in schizophrenia: an extension phase of a randomized controlled trial

“…/hup.1137 tolerability. So far, no single adjunctive agent has been definitely proved to be effective (Whitehead et al, 2002;Rummel et al, 2005), and the role of these agents in the treatment of schizophrenia remains uncertain. Thus, to date, the only established pharmacological strategy for treatment-resistant schizophrenia is still monotherapy with clozapine-a drug with superior efficacy, but also with a burden of potentially life-threatening side effects.…”

An unambiguous assay for the cloned human sigma1 receptor reveals high affinity interactions with dopamine D4 receptor selective compounds and a distinct structure–affinity relationship for butyrophenones

“…The lack of a role for the sigma 1 receptor in treating psychosis is further supported by clinical studies with selective sigma 1 receptor antagonists, which have generally failed to show any efficacy for the treatment of the acutely psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia; however, it is still not clear whether negative symptoms might improve (for a review see Volz and Stoll 2004). Of interest in this regard is the idea that antidepressants, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) like fluvoxamine, may be useful addon treatments for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (for a review see Rummel et al, 2005;Moller, 2005). Incidentally, the relatively high affinity of fluvoxamine and selected other antidepressants has led some to suggest that sigma 1 receptors may play a role in the treatment of depression (Narita et al, 1996;Yagasaki et al, 2006;Wang et al, 2007;Dhir and Kulkarni, 2007) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (Egashira et al, 2007).…”