Antipsychotic Polypharmacy and High-Dose Antipsychotics in Involuntary Patients: a Seven-Year Audit of Discharge...

Antipsychotic polypharmacy (APP) is a psychopharmacological practice in which two or more antipsychotics are prescribed simultaneously. Despite the absence of evidence to support it, it is highly prevalent in clinical settings. Another recurrent practice strongly associated with APP is the prescription of high-dose antipsychotics (HDAs). Compulsory treatment is a legal means to impose treatment on an individual suffering from mental illness who refuses therapeutic intervention. Compulsory treatment has been associated with APP and HDAs and rates of both have been proposed to represent indicators of the quality of prescribing. We aimed to perform an antipsychotic prescription audit in a vulnerable psychiatric population, at the psychiatry department of a district hospital in Portugal, across 7 years. We evaluated APP and HDAs in 403 compulsorily admitted patients by reviewing their files at discharge. We used logistic regression to search for factors associated with APP and HDAs. APP was found in 70.5% of individuals, whereas HDAs were found in 51.4%. After adjustment, APP was significantly associated with male gender (Odds Ratio[OR] = 1.85 [1.04; 3.30] 95% Confidence Interval [CI]), involuntary outpatient treatment (OR = .40 [.18; .82] 95% CI), activation of the hospital social services (OR = 1.91 [1.08; 3.38] 95%CI), prescription of antidepressants (OR = .43 [.22; .82] 95%CI) and long-acting injectables (LAI) (OR = 28.29 [13.13; 60.97] 95%CI). HDAs were associated with male gender (OR = 1.76 [1.06; 2.94] 95%CI), the prescription of LAI (OR = 12.92 [6.93; 24.09] 95%CI) and oral first-generation antipsychotics (OR = 2.90 [1.51; 5.60] 95%CI).