The acute efficacy of aripiprazole across the symptom spectrum of schizophrenia: a pooled post hoc analysis from 5 short-term studies.

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the efficacy of aripiprazole across a range of symptoms-positive, negative, disorganized thought, depression/anxiety, and hostility-in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.

METHOD: Pooled data were analyzed from 5 short-term, double-blind, multicenter studies (published between 1997 and 2007) involving patients hospitalized with acute exacerbation of schizophrenia (5 studies) or schizoaffective disorder (2 studies) and randomly assigned to aripiprazole (N = 875), haloperidol (N = 193), risperidone (N = 95), or placebo (N = 406). Aripiprazole doses ranged from 2 to 30 mg/day. Patients receiving the ineffective 2-mg dose were excluded from the primary analyses presented here. Factor analysis of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) data was used to evaluate changes from baseline with aripiprazole on 5 symptom factors-positive, negative, disorganized thought, depression/anxiety, and hostility-in 2 population subsets-schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Pairwise comparisons were made as follows for schizophrenia: aripiprazole versus placebo in all 5 studies; aripiprazole, haloperidol, and placebo in 3 studies; and aripiprazole, risperidone, and placebo in 1 study. Patients with schizoaffective disorder in 2 studies were included in the comparison of aripiprazole and placebo.

RESULTS

Aripiprazole was significantly better than placebo in improving all 5 PANSS factor scores from baseline (each p < .001) in the schizophrenia dataset. In schizoaffective disorder, aripiprazole was significantly better than placebo for the improvement of positive (p <or= .05) and hostility (p <or= .01) factor scores. Analysis of the 3 studies involving haloperidol showed that aripiprazole was significantly better than placebo in improving all 5 factors (p <or= .01), whereas haloperidol produced significantly greater improvements than placebo in 3 factors (positive, disorganized thought, and hostility) (each p < .001). There was no difference between aripiprazole and haloperidol on any factor. Analysis of the study involving risperidone showed that both drugs were better than placebo for all 5 factors with the exception of the depression/anxiety factor, in which only risperidone separated from placebo. There was no difference between aripiprazole and risperidone on any factor.

CONCLUSION

In this large dataset, aripiprazole was associated with improvements in a broad range of symptom domains in the short-term treatment of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.