Clinical Effectiveness of Lurasidone Monotherapy in Patients with Acute Episodes of Schizophrenia and Associated Symptoms of Depression

Abstract

A significant proportion of patients with schizophrenia have depressive symptoms [Lindenmayer, J.-P., 1991; Siris S.G., 2000; Majadas, S., 2012; Miura I., 2021; Liu, 2021]. If in the postpsychotic period depression is found in approximately 20% of patients with schizophrenia, then at the time of exacerbations its frequency increases to 60%, and in total in the anamnesis, especially at the initial stage,. When taking into account the anamnestic data, especially the initial stage, the incidence of depression reaches 80% of patients with schizophrenia suffer from depression [Upthegrove, R., 2017]. Depression is now considered part of the main symptomatology of schizophrenia, added as one of the dimensions in the diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorders [Tandon, R., 2013; Upthegrove, R., 2017; Liu, 2021]. As it turned out, neither the traditional dichotomy of affective disorders and schizophrenia, nor their polarization with the "introduction" of an intermediate diagnostic category - schizoaffective psychosis, nor the now prevailing concept of a wide range of intermediate phenotypes with different representations of psychotic and affective disorders, or a multidimensional phenomenological continuum from conditionally " pure" schizophrenia to the same "pure" bipolar disorder [Reininghaus, U., 2016, 2019; Tamminga, C.A., 2013]. It remains problematic to single out a reference or key feature that makes it possible to distinguish related forms of psychotic and affective disorders. For example, symptoms of depression in patients with schizophrenia are associated with cognitive impairment and in real clinical practice, when assessed at the current moment, are difficult to distinguish from typical negative symptoms of schizophrenia.