JAMA psychiatry: real hammer! The effect of multi drug combination is better than that of single drug!

February 28, 2019 / Biovalley / a new study finds that in the maintenance treatment of schizophrenia, the combination of two specific drugs is related to the reduction of the risk of recurrence compared with the use of a single drug The study was recently published in JAMA In psychiatry, completed by researchers at the Karolinska Institute, the researchers said the current guidelines should be revised to oppose the classification of all antipsychotic drugs Photo source: http://cn.bing.com the efficacy of antipsychotics in the prevention of relapse has been controversial, and it is generally believed that the use of multiple drugs will damage the health of the body, but there is not much evidence for this view, and the combination of antipsychotics is also common Researchers from the Karolinska Institute conducted a large study to determine whether there was a difference in the risk of psychiatric relapse after patients were treated with a single drug versus multiple drugs The study involved 62000 patients, all treated in Finland between 1972 and 2014 The researchers then tracked the patients to see if they were readmitted for psychiatric care, an indicator of disease recurrence The average follow-up time was 14.1 years, and to avoid differences between patients, the researchers conducted an individual analysis of them The results showed that compared with single drug, the combination of multiple drugs usually reduced the risk of disease recurrence, but not all drug combinations had this effect Aripiprazole combined with clozapine had the best effect Compared with clozapine alone, the risk was reduced by 14% - 23%, and clozapine was the best single drug The existing treatment guidelines recommend the use of single therapy, as far as possible to avoid multi drug combination But the study changed that The researchers say their results suggest that the current guidance should change the classification and recommendation that they refuse to use all drug combinations Although there is not much evidence for the superiority of multi drug combination, which needs to be repeated in other countries, there is no evidence that the efficacy of single drug is better than that of multi drug combination at present Reference materials: Jari tiihonen et al Association of antipsychotic polypharmacy vs montheapy with psychiatric rehospitalization among results with schizophrenia, JAMA psychiatry (2019) Doi: 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.4320