What about temperature? Haloperidol-induced hypotermia

Abstract

The use of treatment with antipsychotic drugs highlights the difficulty of finding the right balance between the benefit on psychotic symptoms and the risk of the occurrence of adverse reactions. There is a strong genetic and pharmacological evidence supporting the hypothesis that activation of D2 receptors could lead to hypothermia and that the treatment haloperidol is capable of inducing hypothermia apomorfino similarily in laboratory animals. It also seems that, haloperidol is not the only antipsychotic able to determine this type of reaction, as some evidence suggests that other drugs such as reserpine, chlorpromazine would be capable of inducing hypothermia. Finally, while some studies suggest the possible occurrence of haloperidol-induced hypothermia only in laboratory animals, other authors argue that this same reaction can occur in humans as well. In this report, we describe the cases, rarely witnessed in the literature, of three patients in whom the administration of haloperidol caused hypothermia.

Characteristics of antipsychotic drug‐induced hypothermia in psychogeriatric inpatients

“…Chlorpromazine was well‐known to reduce BCT since it was introduced in 1952 (Ban, 2007), when it was used in anesthesia to support body cooling during surgery (so‐called artificial hibernating) (López‐Muñoz et al., 2005). Nowadays, hypothermia has been reported in the context of the use of different, typical as well as atypical, APD (Szota & Araszkiewicz, 2019; van Marum et al., 2007; Zonnenberg et al., 2017) including haloperidol (Signorelli et al., 2013), clozapine (Papazisis et al., 2009), aripiprazole (Kozian et al., 2019), olanzapine (Kreuzer et al., 2012), pipamperone (Kamp, Paschali, & Lange‐Asschenfeldt, 2016), risperidone (Brandon Bookstaver & Miller, 2011) and combinations (Kamp, Paschali, Supprian, et al., 2016).…”