The advocacy website Mad in America recently published a post about a Jama Psychiatry study that reported a breakthrough finding.
The article discovered that subjects in the study saw a doubled recovery rate if their antipsychotic treatment was reduced or discontinued compared to those who maintained their antipsychotic treatment.
This study was a follow up study of 128 patients who had participated in a two-year open randomized clinical trial comparing [maintenance treatment] and [dose reduction] from October 2001 to December 2002. After six months of remission, patients were randomly assigned to DR strategy or MT for 18 months, and after the trial, treatment was at the discretion of the physician. Researchers contacted patients 5 years after the trial had ended, and 103 patients consented to participate in a follow up interview about the course and outcomes of psychosis.
The DR patients (n=52) experienced twice the recovery rate of the MT patients (n=51) (40.4 percent versus 17.6 percent). Better DR recovery rates were related to higher functional remission rates in the DR group but were not related to symptomatic remission rates, according to the study results.
Researchers made the following conclusions:
- Schizophrenia treatment strategy trials should include recovery or functional remission rates as their primary outcome
- These trials should include long-term follow-up for more than 2 years, even up to 7 years or longer
- Benefits that were not evident in short-term evaluations, such as functional gains, only appeared during long-term monitoring.
This confirms what we have seen with many Truehope participants, but it will be interesting to watch further studies to see if the results can be duplicated and with larger sample sizes.