Early onset of treatment effects with oral risperidone.docVIP

BMC Psychiatry BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Early onset of treatment effects with oral risperidone Thomas J Raedler*1, Andreas Schreiner2, Dieter Naber1 and Klaus Wiedemann1 Address: 1Department of Psychiatry, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany and 2Department of Medical Scientific Affairs, Janssen-Cilag, Raiffeisenstr. 8, 41470 Neuss, Germany Email: Thomas J Raedler* - traedler@uke.uni-hamburg.de; Andreas Schreiner - aschrein@; Dieter Naber - naber@uke.uni- hamburg.de; Klaus Wiedemann - wiedemann@uke.uni-hamburg.de * Corresponding author Published: 19 January 2007 Received: 08 November 2006 Accepted: 19 January 2007 BMC Psychiatry 2007, 7:4 doi:10.1186/1471-244X-7-4 This article is available from: /1471-244X/7/4 ? 2007 Raedler et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The dogma of a delayed onset of antipsychotic treatment effects has been maintained over the past decades. However, recent studies have challenged this concept. We therefore performed an analysis of the onset of antipsychotic treatment effects in a sample of acutely decompensated patients with schizophrenia. Methods: In this observational study, 48 inpatients with acutely decompensated schizophrenia were offered antipsychotic treatment with oral risperidone. PANSS-ratings were obtained on day 0, day 1, day 3, day 7 and day 14. Results: Significant effects of treatment were already present on day 1 and continued throughout the study. The PANSS positive subscore and the PANSS total score improved significantly more than the PANSS negative subscore. Conclusion: Our results are consistent with the growing number of