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Practice guidelines hold that antipsychotic drugs do not rapidly affect the target symptoms of schizophrenia. These researchers identified trajectories of response, improvement, and remission by reanalyzing data from two 8-week, multicenter, randomized comparisons of the atypical antipsychotics amisulpride and risperidone (N=538). Scores on the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) were the primary outcome variable. Remission was defined as mild or low levels of eight symptoms (e.g., conceptual disorganization, hallucinations, blunted affect, social withdrawal, and mannerisms).
The researchers identified five distinct groups of patients with different trajectories of response regardless of the antipsychotic. Three moderate-response groups (n…