Abstract

Background: Schizophrenia (SCH) is a serious mental disorder, clinical syndrome, characterized with various psychopathological symptoms, composed of a series of psychological and behavioral symptoms. Over the past decades, great attention has been given to the treatment of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders, and the focus is on a new class of antipsychotic drugs. Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate variations in the pharmacological efficacy of typical (TA) and atypical antipsychotics (AA) prescribed in the treatment of schizophrenia using PANSS scale. Methods: The research was done as an retrospective-prospective clinical study that has evaluated different PANSS scores in patients with SCH over a two-year period. A total of 58 patients with schizophrenia, and 82 healthy subjects participated in this study. Results: Typical and atypical antipsychotics showed equal efficacy in reducing positive symptoms and there were no significant statistics difference between them (p> 0.005), but atypical antipsychotics showed greater efficacy in reducing of negative symptoms of SCH. Conclusion: We showed that both groups of drugs were equally effective in reducing positive symptoms of SCH, and that atypical antipsychotics were still statistically significantly more effective in reducing negative symptoms of SCH. The main observation of a statistically significant higher efficacy of atypical antipsychotics in our relatively small sample most likely speaks in favor of their superiority.

Key words: Schizophrenia, typical antipsychotics, atypical antipsychotics