Antipsychotic patterns in outpatients with schizophrenia in China: A cross sectional study

It is essential to monitor pharmacological treatment for schizophrenic outpatients regularly in clinical practice. Especially in China, the situation of common prescribing patterns remains unclear. The objective of this study is to reveal real-world treatment prescription patterns of antipsychotics for schizophrenia patients in a representative large tertiary hospital in China. This study is a cross-sectional observational analysis of outpatients with schizophrenia in a large tertiary psychiatric hospital in Beijing, China, from May 11th to 24th, 2019. Data on subjects’ socio-demographic and clinical characteristics, prescriptions of psychotropic drugs were collected from the electronic medical record (EMR) system with a standardized protocol. A multivariate analysis was performed to explore the potential association between antipsychotics treatments and subjects’ characteristics. Of the 1940 patients included in this study, only 1470 (75.77%) patients were prescribed antipsychotic medications. 1228 (83.53%) patients were prescribed second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs), 202 (13.74%) patients were treated only with first-generation antipsychotics (FGAs), 40 (2.72%) were prescribed both SGAs and FGAs. The proportion of single SGAs prescriptions was significantly higher than that of single FGAs antipsychotics in each course of monotherapy group, especially among patients with the course less than 2 years (96.08%). Risperidone was most frequently prescribed antipsychotic medication during the study (29.86%, 439 out of 1470). Intermediate-acting sedative benzodiazepines were the most commonly co-prescribed psychotropic class at 23.66%. Long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAIs) could be the prescribing trend in clinics. Disease course, self-paying cost and LAI antipsychotic use were independently associated with antipsychotics treatments. Second-generation antipsychotics showed domination in prescriptions. More concerns should be paid with concomitant psychiatric medications in clinics.