Polifarmacia en la prescripción de antipsicóticos en consultas de psiquiatría

Antipsychotic drugs make up the treatment basis of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. At present, the new antipsychotics, atypical antipsychotics (AA), are recommended by different experts' committees as first line agents as they have demonstrated high efficacy with a better adverse effects (AE) profile in several studies. Although the research studies have been performed under monotherapy conditions and, therefore, the different consensus advocate their use, in recent years, a tendency has been observed in the daily clinical practice consisting in the use of several antipsychotic drugs at the same time, in spite of the absence of scientific data that support the effectiveness and efficiency of this practice. To demonstrate this fact, Clark et al. performed a study in which they indicate that the percentage of patients receiving polytherapy in a cohort of 836 patients diagnosed of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder had gone from 5.7 % in 1994 to 24.3 % in 1999. In all, it Summary