Objective: Atypical antipsychotics are used in the gradually increasing rates in the administration of various disorders in the child and adolescent psychiatry. The risperidone that is of the oldest atypical antipsychotics in the usage has been studied much more in the child and adolescents when compared to the other atypical antipsychotics. There are studies, which notify benefits with the short and long-term risperidone treatment in the child and adolescents both showing normal cognitive development and having mental retardation. The data at hand regarding the effects of the atypical antipsychotics on the metabolic parameters in the children and adolescents are yet limited. Therefore, in this research, the relations between the doses that a group of patients, who is followed with risperidone treatment and with various diagnoses in a Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (DCAP) polyclinics and the prolactin and thyroxin values have been evaluated.
Method: The patients followed within the year of 2013 in the Abant Izzet Baysal University Medicine Faculty DCAP have formed the population of this cross-sectional retrospective research. Nineteen patients from the cases whose file data is complete and whose prolactin and thyroxin data can be accessed have been taken to the research. The data has been recorded to a database prepared with the program of SPSS 16.0, and it has been evaluated with the definitive statistics and non-parametric tests. P has been taken as 0.05.
Results: 68.4% of the sample is girl, the age median of the patients has been found as 11.5 (Range 11.0). The diagnosis median has been determined as 2.0 (Range 1.0). The most frequent diagnoses are mental retardation (57.9%), Disruptive Behavior Disorders (47.4%), Mood Disorders (26.3%) and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (21.1%). The median of the risperidone dose, which is prescribed for the treatment, is 1.5 (Range 5.5) mg/ day. The T4, TSH, Prolactin and Vitamin B12 levels medians have been determined as; respectively 1.1 (Range 0.7), 2.5 (Range 5.6), 35.0 (117.6) and 479.4 (1369.0). In the binary correlations, the relationship between the risperidone dose and metabolic measurements has not been determined. With the Mann-Whitney U test, the significant difference has been determined only in terms of the TSH values of the girl and boy patients (Z=-2.1, p=0.04). The significant difference has not been determined in terms of the risperidone dose and metabolic measurements between the child (younger than 12 years-old, 52.6%) and adolescent (age of 12 and over, 47.4%) patients. The number of diagnosis and the dose of risperidone did not show relation.
Conclusion: In this initial research, in a heterogeneous sample having comorbid diagnoses, the relation between the risperidone dose and metabolic measurements has not been determined, only the TSH values of the girl and boy patients have showed significant differences. Our results can depend on the scarcity in the sample size, size of the data loss or the Type II error. It is required that our findings should be supported with the researches to be executed prospectively over wider samples.