Real-World Effectiveness of Antipsychotic Treatments in a Nationwide Cohort of 29 823 Patients With Schizophrenia

It has remained unclear whether there are clinically meaningful differences between antipsychotic treatments with regard to preventing relapse of schizophrenia, owing to the impossibility of including large unselected patient populations in randomized clinical trials, as well as residual confounding from selection biases in observational studies.

To study the comparative real-world effectiveness of antipsychotic treatments for patients with schizophrenia. Design, Setting, and Participants: Prospectively gathered nationwide databases were linked to study the risk of rehospitalization and treatment failure from July 1, 2006, to December 31, 2013, among all patients in Sweden with a schizophrenia diagnosis who were 16 to 64 years of age in 2006 (29 823 patients in the total prevalent cohort; 4603 in the incident cohort of newly diagnosed patients). Within-individual analyses were used for primary analyses, in which each individual was used as his or her own control to eliminate selection bias. Traditional Cox proportional hazards multivariate regression was used for secondary analyses. Main Outcomes and Measures: Risk of rehospitalization and treatment failure (defined as psychiatric rehospitalization, suicide attempt, discontinuation or switch to other medication, or death).