Finland. Finland's National Agency for Medicines has reviewed common antipsychotic-associated reactions reported to its adverse drug reaction (ADR) registry, and found that the atypical antipsychotics "do not appear to be without adverse effects". During the 30-year period covered by Finland's ADR registry, a total of 974 antipsychotic-associated ADRs have been reported, 564 of which have been received since 1994. Clozapine was the suspected drug in 484 reports, with adverse events including leucopenia, granulocytopenia and agranulocytosis, often with infectious signs, and was the suspected drug in 22 fatalities (see Table 2 for other antipsychotics). Since 1994, as use of the newer atypical antipsychotics has replaced use of conventional antipsychotics, the majority of reports, even after clozapine (n = 306), involved these newer agents (risperidone [n = 65], olanzapine [45] and quetiapine [36]) and, even with the increasing use of these newer agents, there were still reports of serious adverse events (see Table 3).

Reference:

TABU: Drug Information from the National Agency for Medicines, Finland, 2: 50-52, 2004.

Table 1. Antipsychotic-associated diabetes

Table 2. Antipsychotic-associated ADRs over 30·years

Table 3. Serious events since 1994