Evidence-based pharmacotherapy of schizophrenia

Introduction Enormous scientific efforts have been made since the development of chlorpromazine in 1953 to improve the drug treatment of schizophrenia leading to more than 10 000 controlled trials currently summarized in the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group’s register (Adams et al., 2008). In this context, the current article presents our personal interpretation of the core evidence about the pharmacological treatment of schizophrenia. Other interpretations exist and the article cannot compete with national treatment guidelines that have been methodologically developed (e.g. Lehman et al., 2004). But what makes our article different is that it attempts to follow the logical steps of clinical care. Arranged as a simple algorithm it starts from the choice of an antipsychotic for acutely ill patients and ends with the most important questions about maintenance treatment. Method, The report is based on published systematic reviews or relevant key articles on topics not yet covered by a systematic review. We did not perform a literature search for this review but the first author (S.L.) regularly runs MEDLINE searches with the key words “antipsychotic OR schizophreni ’.