Sertindole: a review of clinical efficacy

Schizophrenia is the most serious and disabling form of psychiatric disorder, and affects 1% of people worldwide. Until recently, treatment has relied heavily on the use of conventional antipsychotic drugs. These drugs do help schizophrenic patients, but have severe limitations. Conventional antipsychotic drugs are not effective in all patients, and even in patients who respond to treatment, the improvement in negative symptoms is often minimal. In fact, these drugs can increase negative symptoms through the production of severe neurological side effects. In recent years, novel antipsychotics have been developed which have superior efficacy and safety profiles. Sertindole is a novel antipsychotic which has been tested in large clinical trials in North America and Europe; the results showed that this drug has efficacy against both the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, while causing adverse neurological events at a similar level to that observed in patients taking placebo. The Positive and Negative Symptom Scale used in these trials showed that sertindole was as effective as haloperidol in controlling positive symptoms, and was superior to placebo in reducing negative symptoms, whereas haloperidol was not. These trials also confirmed that sertindole does not cause the neurological side effects common to the conventional antipsychotics.