What is it about?
We tried a new way of finding out if people with schizophrenia get better with medicines. We asked doctors to tell us when people were prescribed a medicine called paliperidone palmitate (PP). This medicine is for people with schizophrenia. When doctors answered special questions about how well people were doing on this medicine, we got a copy of the answers too. After a year, we compared answers for the medicine PP with answers for other medicines. We found that all medicines were making people feel better after a year. Our new way of finding out if people with schizophrenia get better is good. We also found that people with schizophrenia given PP in hospital were sent home sooner than people given other medicines.
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Why is it important?
We showed that how doctors already measure to see if medicines are working in their day-to-day work, can also be used in research studies. This is the first study to do this in the UK. It means that potentially lots more studies could use the questions already answered by doctors without having to ask for answers to other questions. This will make other studies easier to do.
Perspectives
We worked hard to make sure that we completed this study with a grant from industry. Although we didn't find things hugely in favour of the company we still published our work.
Parastou Donyai
University of Reading
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The utility of novel outcome measures in a naturalistic evaluation of schizophrenia treatment, March 2018, Dove Medical Press,
DOI: 10.2147/ndt.s151174.
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