International Journal of Research in Medical Sciences | July-September 2014 | Vol 2 | Issue 3 Page 1058 International Journal of Research in Medical Sciences Rode SB et al. Int J Res Med Sci. 2014 Aug;2(3):1058-1062 www.msjonline.org pISSN 2320-6071 | eISSN 2320-6012 Research Article Pharmacoepidemiological survey of schizophrenia in Central India Sonali B. Rode 1 , Harsh V. Salankar 1 *, Pravin R. Verma 2 , Umesh Sinha 3 , Rajesh K. Ajagallay 4 INTRODUCTION Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating psychiatric illness consisting primarily of symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, also termed as “positive” symptoms. In addition, individuals may experience “negative” symptoms which include loss of sense of pleasure, social withdrawal, impoverishment of thoughts and speech and flattening of affect. According to WHO estimates, schizophrenia affects approximately 24 million people worldwide. 1 The prevalence of schizophrenia varies across the world, within countries, and at the local and neighborhood level. 2,3 The most recent publications estimate that prevalence of schizophrenia ranges from 1.4 to 4.6 / 1000 and the median incidence varies from 0.15 to 0.20 / 1000 population/year 4,5 and it is higher (7 / 1000 population) in ABSTRACT Background: Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating psychiatric illness affecting around 0.3-0.7% of people at some point in their life. The rate of schizophrenia and related disorders is affected by some environmental factors and social variables. Therefore, pharmacoepidemiological survey of patients suffering from schizophrenia was carried out to analyze the sociodemographic profile and drug prescribing pattern. Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted in psychiatry OPD of a tertiary care hospital for nine months. Diagnosis of schizophrenia was made according to DSM IV-TR criteria. Prescriptions were analyzed for socio demographic details, distribution of subsets of disease and psychotropic drugs prescribed. Results: Amongst 196 cases analyzed, 55.61% were males, 69.9% were below 40 years, 52.04% unmarried, 61.22% belonged to low income group, 82.14% unemployed and 58.16% came from urban locality. Paranoid schizophrenia (79.59%) was the most common diagnosis and a total of 402 psychotropic drugs were prescribed. Average number of psychotropic drugs per prescription was 2.05. Atypical antipsychotics (80.09%) were prescribed more commonly than typical antipsychotics; olanzapine (42.48%) was the commonest antipsychotic drug followed by risperidone (21.68%), haloperidol (19.91%), quetiapine (7.96%), aripiprazole (4.42%) and clozapine (3.54%). As an adjunctive treatment escitalopram, clonazepam and carbamazepine were the commonly prescribed antidepressant, anxiolytic and antimanic agent respectively. Conclusion: Low socioeconomic status, unemployment, urban locality and living alone are the sociodemographic factors associated with schizophrenia. The treatment pattern observed correlates with the changing trends in the treatment of schizophrenia world over. Keywords: Schizophrenia, Epidemiology, Atypical antipsychotics 1 Department of Pharmacology, Chirayu Medical College & Hospital, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India 2 Senior Resident, Institute of Human Behavior and Allied Sciences (IHBAS), Delhi, India 3 Department of Community medicine, Chirayu Medical College & Hospital, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India 4 Department of Psychiatry, Chirayu Medical College & Hospital, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India Received: 18 June 2014 Accepted: 2 July 2014 *Correspondence: Dr. Harsh V. Salankar, E-mail: harshsalankar@gmail.com © 2014 Rode SB et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: 10.5455/2320-6012.ijrms20140874