Christoph Correll, MD: An Overview of Schizophrenia Treatments

Despite being discovered more than 60 years ago, treatment for schizophrenia is still growing.

One of the main reasons for this is that a substantial part of the reason for this is that a large portion of the schizophrenia patients do not respond well to top the line treatments, which is coupled with other discontinuing treatment due to side effects.

In a poster presented at the American Psychiatric Association Virtual Meeting, a research team led by Christoph Correll, MD, professor of Psychiatry at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, examined all clinical practice guidelines for antipsychotic monotherapy for patients with a first schizophrenia episode.

After the extensive review, the team found a different single antipsychotic should be prescribed following the first failed antipsychotic due to ineffectiveness or intolerability. However, there was far less consensus on how maintenance therapies should be utilized.

Correll said this discrepancy is likely because of insufficient long-term data and conflicting results in current meta-analyses.

The recommendations on duration of antipsychotic therapy after a first schizophrenia episode varied across the different clinical practice guidelines.

Correll, explained in an interview with HCPLive®, the effectiveness of the current crop of schizophrenia treatments and what needs to be done in the future to improve care.