And a recent report by pharmacy benefits manager Medco estimated that the prevalence of the drugs’ use among adults ballooned more than 169 percent between 20.Ĭritics say the popularity of atypical antipsychotics reflects a combination of hype that the expensive medicines, which can cost $500 per month, are safer than the earlier generation of drugs hope that they will work for a variety of ailments when other treatments have not and aggressive marketing by drug companies to doctors and patients.
A study published last year found that off-label antipsychotic prescriptions doubled between 19, from 4.4 million to 9 million. For the past three years they have ranked near or at the top of the best-selling classes of drugs, outstripping antidepressants and sometimes cholesterol medicines. In 2010 antipsychotic drugs racked up more than $16 billion in sales, according to IMS Health, a firm that tracks drug trends for the health-care industry. Two recent reports found that children and adolescents in foster care, some less than a year old, are taking more psychotropic drugs than other children, including those with the severest forms of mental illness. These new drugs account for more than 90 percent of the market and have eclipsed an older generation of antipsychotics.
Until the past decade these 11 drugs, most approved in the 1990s, had been reserved for the approximately 3 percent of Americans with the most disabling mental illnesses, chiefly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder more recently a few have been approved to treat severe depression.īut these days atypical antipsychotics - the most popular are Seroquel, Zyprexa and Abilify - are being prescribed by psychiatrists and primary-care doctors to treat a panoply of conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia. Those Georgetown students exemplify a trend that alarms medical experts, policymakers and patient advocates: the skyrocketing increase in the off-label use of an expensive class of drugs called atypical antipsychotics.
“These kids needed some basic sleep, like reducing their intake of caffeine and alcohol, not a highly sedating drug.” “It’s a total outrage,” said Fugh-Berman, a physician who is an associate professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University.
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