Five‐year follow‐up during antipsychotic treatment: efficacy, safety, functional and social outcome

Abstract

The findings underline the chronicity and seriousness of psychotic disorders in terms of social outcome and, indirectly, the low quality of life of this group of persons. Patients were generally well aware of their illness and able to sort out symptoms from drug side effects. This opens for more active involvement of patients in monitoring their own treatment.

Effects of sertindole on cognition in clozapine‐treated schizophrenia patients

“…The lack of improvement by sertindole augmentation is not a consequence of ceiling effects in the cognitive tests, as illustrated by better performances in healthy controls used for construction of norm values. In a five‐year follow‐up study of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, EuroCog cognitive tests on participants showed similar cognitive deficits as those reported here, except on the two indices with particularly low T ‐scores: Simple reaction time and focused attention for which the SERCLOZ participants were more impaired (47, 60). This might reflect that the 5‐year study patients were less ill with respect to symptoms than the current study group – the mean value of the sum of their PANSS scores was 65, that is, half of these patients would not have been eligible for the present study.…”

Psychopathological long‐term outcome of schizophrenia – a review

“…An overview of the studies is given in Table . All studies were naturalistic follow‐up studies . The most frequently used diagnostic criteria were DSM‐III (44%), followed by DSM‐IV (28%), ICD‐10 (20%) and DSM‐III‐R (16%).…”

“…However, only few study used the consensus criteria to define remission . The mean Global Assessment Scale (GAS) values ranged from 42.1 to 64.5 , the proportion of patients with a GAS < 51 ranged from 34% to 70% , the mean Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) total scores ranged from 59.6 to 79.5 , and followed up suicide rates ranged from 5% to 10% . Most patients showed a mixed clinical picture with both positive and negative symptoms .…”

Medium-term course and outcome of schizophrenia depicted by the sixth-month subtype after an acute episode

“…The attrition rates ranged from 10% to 25% annually, an extent comparable to a similar longitudinal study. 42 Thus, we might have excluded patients with very good and very poor outcomes. 43 Although the effects of missing pattern on PANSS profiles in the first 2 years were not noticeable between 2-year completers and the missing, the interpretation of 5-year analysis results should be conservative.…”