Lurasidone in the treatment of schizophrenia: Results of a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in Asian patients.

INTRODUCTION: To evaluate efficacy and safety of lurasidone for the treatment of Asian patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: Patients with schizophrenia from Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Taiwan were randomly assigned to 6 weeks of double-blind treatment with 40 or 80 mg/d of lurasidone or placebo. The primary efficacy measure was change from baseline to week 6 on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) total score. Efficacy was evaluated using a mixed-model repeated-measures (MMRM) analysis in the modified intention-to-treat (mITT) population. RESULTS: On the basis of the analysis for the mITT population, the estimated difference score for lurasidone 40 and 80 mg/d vs placebo was -4.8 (P = 0.050) and -4.2 (P = 0.080). For the full intention-to-treat (ITT) population, the difference score for lurasidone 40 and 80 mg/d vs placebo was -5.8 (P = 0.017) and -4.2 (P = 0.043). The most frequent adverse events in the lurasidone 40 and 80 mg/d and placebo groups, respectively, were akathisia (7.3%, 10.4%, 3.3%), somnolence (6.0%, 2.6%, 0.7%), and vomiting (6.0%, 5.8%, 2.0%). The proportion of patients experiencing clinically significant weight gain (≥7%) was 5.3% for lurasidone 40 mg/d, 1.3% for 80 mg/d, and 1.4% for placebo. End point changes in metabolic parameters and prolactin were comparable for both lurasidone groups and placebo. CONCLUSIONS: In the ITT (but not the mITT) population, treatment with lurasidone was associated with significant improvement in the PANSS total score in patients with schizophrenia. Lurasidone was generally well tolerated with minimal impact on weight and metabolic parameters.

Facial and prosodic emotion recognition in social anxiety disorder.

INTRODUCTION: Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have a cognitive preference to negatively evaluate emotional information. In particular, the preferential biases in prosodic emotion recognition in SAD have been much less explored. The present study aims to investigate whether SAD patients retain negative evaluation biases across visual and auditory modalities when given sufficient response time to recognise emotions. METHODS: Thirty-one SAD patients and 31 age- and gender-matched healthy participants completed a culturally suitable non-verbal emotion recognition task and received clinical assessments for social anxiety and depressive symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine group differences in emotion recognition. RESULTS: Compared to healthy participants, SAD patients were significantly less accurate at recognising facial and prosodic emotions, and spent more time on emotion recognition. The differences were mainly driven by the lower accuracy and longer reaction times for recognising fearful emotions in SAD patients. Within the SAD patients, lower accuracy of sad face recognition was associated with higher severity of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, particularly with avoidance symptoms. CONCLUSION: These findings may represent a cross-modality pattern of avoidance in the later stage of identifying negative emotions in SAD. This pattern may be linked to clinical symptom severity.

Impulsive behaviors in female patients with eating disorders in a university hospital in northern Taiwan.

Eating disorders (EDs) are often associated with various impulsive behaviors. This study investigated the prevalence of impulsive behaviors in ED patients in Taiwan. Three hundred sixteen female outpatients with ED and 142 psychiatric controls were recruited. All participants completed self-administered questionnaires assessing lifetime presence of impulsive behaviors, including suicide, self-injury, stealing, alcohol use, illicit drug use, excessive spending, sexual promiscuity, and general psychopathology. More than 60% of the ED patients had at least one impulsive behavior. The most common impulsive behaviors among ED patients were excessive spending (34.9%), deliberate self-harm (32.7%), and stealing (26.3%). However, there were no significant differences in prevalences of any impulsive behaviors between ED patients and psychiatric controls. Clinicians should routinely assess and treat impulsive behaviors in female psychiatric patients with negative affectivity, regardless of the presence of ED, to help prevent potential adverse outcomes related to impulsive behaviors.