Therapeutic effectiveness and tolerability of aripiprazole as initial choice of treatment in first episode psychosis in an early intervention service: A one-year outcome study

Real-life assessment of aripiprazole monthly (Abilify Maintena) in schizophrenia: a Canadian naturalistic non-interventional prospective cohort study

“…However, this proportion of patients with significant weight gain was not different between the stages of psychosis; early vs late. This proportion is lower than that reported in a recent study [35] where oral aripiprazole was associated with a higher proportion of first-episode psychosis patients showing clinically significant weight gain. This difference could be explained by differences in patient characteristics, with the latter study sample comprised of patients with first episode psychosis with little or no previous exposure to antipsychotic medications.…”

Predictors of ‘all-cause discontinuation’ of initial oral antipsychotic medication in first episode psychosis

“…The propensity to gain weight is associated with all SGAs, including aripiprazole, for patients with limited prior exposure to antipsychotic medications (Malla et al, 2016;Miller, 2008). We observed that weight gain was associated particularly with time to discontinuation, with those gaining weight likely to discontinue medication early in the course of their treatment.…”

“…Possible reasons for discontinuation of medication include lack of efficacy (Perkins et al, 2008) or conversely, extremely rapid resolution of symptoms (Kane et al, 2013;Steger et al, 2012) and inability to tolerate the side effects of the medication prescribed (Miller, 2008), such as weight gain. While efficacy of different SGAs as first line treatment in FEP appears to be relatively similar, weight gain is reported to be worse for olanzapine and less so for aripiprazole (Almandil et al, 2013); although in FEP patients aripiprazole has been reported to cause weight gain (Malla et al 2016). Apart from putative differential benefits (timely resolution of symptoms) or side effects of various antipsychotic medications, other factors that affect outcome may be equally important for determining risk of discontinuation of first antipsychotic prescribed.…”

Weight gain changes in patients with aripiprazole monotherapy compared with aripiprazole–antidepressant polypharmacy in an outpatient sample

“…In AP naïve patients, weight gain was more pronounced for all AP (Bak et al, 2014) medications and was also dependent upon the duration of use (Tarricone et al, 2010). Malla et al (2016) showed that despite the good symptomatic response and good tolerability of aripiprazole, about 44% of patients with minimal prior exposure to AP gained in excess of 7% increase of body weight over one-year period.…”