Adjunctive treatment of acute mania: a clinical overview.

CONCLUSION: The available placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials support adjunctive therapy combining lithium or valproate with olanzapine, risperidone, haloperidol or quetiapine. The additional increment of antimanic efficacy of these combinations over monotherapy was similar in magnitude to that seen for the same agents as monotherapy in comparison with placebo. These additive benefits enhanced the tolerability of adverse effects sufficiently to allow a higher proportion of subjects receiving combination therapies to complete the studies than monotherapy treated patients. The available data has several shortcomings and the available studies are inadequate to conclusively determine whether combination treatment is more efficacious than monotherapy when used by subjects naive to both treatments. Nevertheless, adjunctive treatment, which combines agents with proven antimanic efficacy, offers an attractive option for patients with acute mania. PMID: 17688460 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
Source: Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Supplementum - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl Source Type: research