Does Combined Antipsychotic Treatment Provide Better Control on Symptoms in Patients with Schizophrenia than the Monotherapy?

Objective: Combined antipsychotic treatment is frequently used in clinical practice either to improve the symptom control or to reduce the severity of side effects. The expected benefits by combining different antipsychotics include active cross-titration and co-utilization of different administration routes of the therapeutic agents. However, except the add-on therapies to clozapine, there is no objective evidence implying the superiority of combined therapy over monotherapy. Furthermore, there are a number of published case reports of significant side effects accompanying combined antipsychotic usage such as extrapyramidal and metabolic symptoms, seizures, and electrocardiographic abnormalities. It is also argued that switching into a new therapeutic agent might be more beneficial than augmenting the ongoing medication by polypharmacy. Here, we studied on a group of hospitalized schizophrenia patients in a training and research hospital in Turkey whether the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) scores differ between the patients under monotherapy and combined therapy.

Methods: Hospital records belonging patients with schizophrenia who were followed up between the years of 2003 and 2013 were retrieved. Schizophrenia diagnoses were re-evaluated and confirmed according to the DSM-IV-TR criteria. All the patients who met the diagnostic criteria and having PANSS subscale scores (n=158) were included in the study. PANSS scores at the time of hospitalization are represented by adding “-before” suffixes, while the ones at the time of discharge by adding “-after”.

Results: Our series composed of 158 schizophrenia patients (54 women and 104 men). When the medications were reviewed, we found that 66 patients (41.8%) were treated with a single drug and the atypical antipsychotics were the most commonly used group. Multiple drugs were combined on 92 patients (58.2%) and the most common combination was the “atypical + typical” antipsychotics. PANSS subscales and their comparisons among the groups of monotherapy and combined therapy revealed a slight statistical difference in PANSS negative scores at the time of hospitalization, although we found no significant changes in terms of PANSS scales, in general.

Conclusion: In this study, we presented the overall frequency and patterns of our combined antipsychotic therapy in our daily routine work. We only used severity of symptoms in our study, and observed no differences between mono and combined therapy groups in terms of the PANSS evaluation. Further clinical studies with clinical, metabolic, and laboratory data as well as the long follow-ups are needed to uncover if combined therapy proves to be beneficial over monotherapy