Switching stable patients with schizophrenia from depot and oral antipsychotics to long‐acting injectable risperidone: reasons for switching and safety

Abstract

Switch to RLAI was well-tolerated in stable patients over 6 months. The European data set is generalizable to the UK patient population.

Switching stable patients with schizophrenia from depot and oral antipsychotics to long‐acting injectable risperidone: efficacy, quality of life and functional outcome

“…Further significant symptom improvements from baseline were also observed in the European data as a whole . Symptom improvement is reflected in the low number of patients discontinuing RLAI therapy early due to insufficient response (n ¼ 11, 6%;Hawley et al, 2010).…”

“…There are no meaningful differences between the UK and European cohorts in terms of gender ratio, age, duration of illness, diagnosis, hospital admission status (past or present) and body weight or ESRS scores. However, some differences can be found in the antipsychotic treatment that subjects were receiving before the study switch to RLAI (Hawley et al, 2010) and this may have been reflected in the severity of illness at baseline between the two patient populations.…”

“…Improvements in health related quality of life and treatment satisfaction are also likely to positively affect patient attitudes towards long-term therapy, and may have contributed to improved patient compliance with medication. Only 3% of patients discontinued RLAI therapy early due to non-compliance (Hawley et al, 2010).…”

“…The switching methods from oral antipsychotics and from depot antipsychotics all enabled the outgoing antipsychotic to overlap with the incoming RLAI for 3 weeks. The switching schedule from previous antipsychotic medication has been reported by Hawley et al (2010). Patients received intramuscular (gluteal) injections of RLAI at an initial dose of 25 mg every 2 weeks for 6 months.…”

“…To investigate the possible effect of differences in national health care systems and of diverging clinician and patient choice of antipsychotic medications, this secondary analysis presents results from the StoRMi trial of the UK subgroup of patients, detailing efficacy, functional outcome, quality of life and treatment satisfaction. Results regarding previous medications, reasons for switching and safety data are reported elsewhere (Hawley et al, 2010).…”