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Prescribing strategies for antipsychotic medications require evaluating dose-response relationships — doses at which optimal clinical responses are achieved. To examine these, investigators performed a meta-analysis of 68 placebo-controlled, fixed-dose studies for acute schizophrenia that used the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale or the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (1–6 studies per medication).
Oral and injectable preparations of 20 atypical antipsychotics and haloperidol were studied. The investigators estimated the effective doses producing 95% of maximum symptom reduction compared with placebo (ED95s), a customary measure in dose-response studies.
At doses higher than ED95s, response curves generally plateaued. For oral preparations,…