The Role of Long-Acting Antipsychotics in Patients Suffering a Schizophrenia and Comorbid Drug Use The Case of Paliperidone Palmitate

The psychopharmacological treatment of psychotic dual disorders is a real challenge for the clinicians, due to the low level of adherence to the treatment in many cases. For this reason, in some recent guides (Cochrane, Nice) it had been proposed the use of Long-term antipsychotic treatment (LAI-APS) as a way to improve the adherence and increase the efficacy of the treatment. Paliperidone Palmitate is one the most recent LAI-APS, with very good results in the treatment of psychotic disorder, with low number of drop-outs due to the good tolerability to these effects. The authors carry-out a preliminary study comparing the tolerability and efficacy of this LAI-APS in two samples of schizophrenic patients, one of them with comorbid drug use. Our results shows that the treatment permits in both groups the decrease of dosage and/or number of concomitant oral antipsychotic treatment, decrease the number of psychiatric admissions and the use of drug, with no drop-out during a period of one years, comparing with the previous year. We conclude that Paliperidone Palmitate could be a useful treatment in the group of patients suffering psychotic disorder with comorbid drug use.