Loading...
Because antidepressants are only weakly effective for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), guidelines recommend trauma-specific psychotherapies as first-line treatment. In this trial of 416 adults (age, <65) with civilian PTSD, all patients received the antidepressant sertraline and were randomized to receive augmentation with the atypical antipsychotic brexpiprazole or placebo. Three quarters of participants had received no previous pharmacotherapy for PTSD.
At week 10, improvement in mean scores on a validated PTSD symptom scale was significantly greater with sertraline plus brexpiprazole than with sertraline plus placebo. The proportion of patients with improvement of at least 30% was significantly higher in the combination-treatment gr…