03. A) Can a Network Meta-Analysis Guide Antipsychotic Selection in Practice? B) Should Antipsychotic Efficacy Rankings Change Clinical Practice? C) Acute Schizophrenia: Which Antipsychotics Top the Latest Lancet Network Meta-Analysis? D) Acute Schizophrenia: Which Antipsychotics Are Most Effective and Tolerable?

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New Network Meta-Analysis of Antipsychotics: Helpful for Clinicians?

For this Quick Take today, let us look together at a network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of antipsychotics for acute schizophrenia published in the Lancet by Johannes Schneider-Thoma and Yikang Zhu as co-first authors. One of the senior authors is Stefan Leucht who you may recognize as being one of the leading experts in network meta-analyses to summarize the psychiatric literature for us.

This current meta-analysis is basically an updated and expanded version of Leucht’s important 2019 summary of the literature. The expansion for this analysis includes studies from China in addition to the usual international studies, ultimately resulting in a large dataset of 388 randomized controlled trials with almost 80,000 subjects.

The typical study duration was six weeks and the median age of patients was 37 years, with about 2/3 being male. The main outcome was symptoms of schizophrenia based