Overview of the findings from the European SOHO study

The European Schizophrenia Outpatient Health Outcomes (SOHO) study is a 3-year, observational, naturalistic study of the outpatient treatment of schizophrenia. Over 10,000 patients from ten countries who were initiating or changing antipsychotic medication for the treatment of schizophrenia within the normal course of care have been enrolled. The 6-, 12-, 24- and some of the 36-month results have been published so far, and have demonstrated that patients treated with olanzapine and clozapine tended to have somewhat better outcomes than patients treated with other atypical or typical antipsychotics on a wide range of pragmatic treatment effectiveness outcomes: response, relapse, remission and treatment discontinuation. Atypical antipsychotics as a class were associated with a lower frequency of extrapyramidal symptoms and anticholinergic use than typical antipsychotics. Weight gain occurred in all treatment cohorts but was greater in patients treated with olanzapine and clozapine. The results from the SOHO study indicate that differences in effectiveness and tolerability do exist between the antipsychotics.