The role of the gut microbiome in treatment-resistant schizophrenia

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Nuala Murray explores a recent Australian case-control study that looks at the associations between changes in gut microbiota and schizophrenia diagnosis, treatment resistance, and clozapine response.

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Predicting treatment-resistant psychosis using routine clinical measures

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Lorna Staines summarises a recent study on predicting treatment-resistant psychosis, which suggests that future risk prediction efforts should seek to consider routinely collected data.

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Antipsychotics for acute treatment of first episode schizophrenia

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Elwira Lubos writes her debut blog on a recent systematic review with pairwise and network meta-analyses, looking at antipsychotic drugs for the acute treatment of patients with first episode schizophrenia.

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Antipsychotics for treatment-resistant schizophrenia

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Murtada Alsaif summarises a recent network meta-analysis, which looks at the efficacy, acceptability and tolerability of antipsychotics for treatment-resistant schizophrenia.

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Lost in anxiety: treatment-resistant anxiety in older people

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Andrés Fonseca appraises a new systematic review of interventions for treatment-resistant anxiety in older people, which finds a disconcerting lack of evidence to help him support the many older patients he sees who are affected by anxiety disorders.

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Lithium is less expensive than olanzapine in treatment-resistant depression, but has unclear clinical benefits

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Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) still represents a challenge to psychiatric practice. Since patients have usually failed at least two antidepressants, drugs originally prescribed for other conditions are often tried as an augmentation (Souery er al., 2006). Amongst them, lithium (a mood-stabiliser used in the treatment of bipolar disorders) as well as atypical antipsychotics (AAPs, indicated for [read the full story…]

Largest RCT so far suggests that ketamine may be useful in the acute treatment of refractory depression

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Major depression is a serious mental illness that often does not respond to mainstream drug treatment (antidepressants). In addition, there is usually a delay of 2-6 weeks before mood improves significantly. In situations like this, when at least two conventional antidepressants have been tried without success, depression is considered treatment-resistant. While multiple different strategies to [read the full story…]

Depressed patients who respond poorly to antidepressants are significantly more likely to develop bipolar disorder, says new cohort study

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Bipolar disorder is a complex health condition and the diagnosis of bipolar depression is a fairly contentious topic. This is because depression occurs in bipolar disorder alongside a wide range of symptoms of mood elevation. Some patients have depressive episodes as well as severely elevated mood during the course of their illness, whereas other patients [read the full story…]