[Which collateral effects influence in the adherence with antipsychotic medication?]

The collateral effects of antipsychotic medication, specially the mental aspects of extrapyramidal symptoms, sexual disorders and weight gain, constitute an important cause of lack of adherence to treatment. The common characteristic to all these effects is that they produce a high subjective distress. This is more related to the capacity to generate suffering to the patient than to the objective severity of a collateral effect. In this paper these collateral effects are revised. The conclusion is that, in spite of the fact that new antipsychotics show an improvement with regard to their collateral effects profile, these drugs include a new profile of distressing effects that must be evaluated and corrected, as a way to optimize the patient's adherence to antipsychotic treatment.