Skip to main content
  • Oral presentation
  • Open access
  • Published:

The treatment of schizophrenia - the state of the evidence

There is a constantly growing body of evidence concerning the pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia. For example, the register of controlled trials of the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group currently contains more than 8000 publications. In this context the lecture will present the current state of the art of the pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia, but using a step by step algorithm from the choice of drug for the acutely patient to effective maintenance treatment for relapse prevention. The following points will be covered: choice of drug, typical versus atypical antipsychotics, which atypical antipsychotic, strategies for agitated patients, negative symptoms, depression, duration of an antipsychotic drug trial, strategies after initial non-response, clozapine, duration-, dose and choice of drug in maintenance treatment. Methodological issues in this competitive area will also be addressed.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Leucht, S. The treatment of schizophrenia - the state of the evidence. Ann Gen Psychiatry 7 (Suppl 1), S69 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-7-S1-S69

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-7-S1-S69

Keywords