Annual health outcomes and treatment costs for schizophrenia populations. Discussion

This article describes a model that estimates annual patient health and cost outcomes for schizophrenia under alternative treatment scenarios. We estimate these outcomes for typical antipsychotics and show how treatment with atypical antipsychotics could have an impact on these outcomes. Patients are divided into 5 subcategories-newly diagnosed, no episode, acute episode(s), extended care, and institutionalized-and patient health and cost outcomes are estimated for each category. The proportion of people in each category is estimated for U.S. general, state mental hospital, and community mental health populations. Outcomes include extrapyramidal and moderate/severe schizophrenia symptom days, employed days, suicides, hospital days, and health costs. For patients treated with typical antipsychotics, annual per-patient symptom days ranged from 55 to 365 and costs ranged fro $16,000 to $57,000, depending on disease severity, Atypical antipsychotics may reduce symptoms and costs through better efficacy for negative symptoms and better compliance.