A patient's first episode of psychosis offers a unique opportunity for
clinicians to impact the individual's entire lifetime course of schizophrenia,
said Nina Schooler, Ph.D., at APA's Institute on Psychiatric Services last
month in New Orleans.
Schooler said longitudinal data regarding the effect of first-episode
treatment on long-term course of disease has been exceedingly difficult to
come by, yet she asserted that there are ample clinical and scientific reasons
for believing that the first episode is a crucial window of opportunity to get
patients started on the right foot.
She is a professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York
Downstate Medical Center.
Especially crucial, she said, is the need for patients and family members
to understand the long-term nature of schizophrenia, and she outlined a staged
strategy for transitioning first-episode patients from the hospital to
community care and into maintenance treatment.
"It is a belief I hold very strongly, though the data have been hard
to assemble, that the quality of experience the patient has in the first
encounter with us is going to color the rest of [the patient's] experience
with the disorder" and his or her prognosis, she said.
"When you are treating chronic patients, you are dealing with an
entire history of experience with the disease," Schooler told
psychiatrists at the institute. "So the first episode represents a
unique window of opportunity to start treatment and to start to do it
right."
But Schooler acknowledged that defining when a patient is experiencing the"
first episode" of psychosis can be difficult, since many patients
are likely to have had anomalous perceptual experiences for years and to have
received any number of diagnoses before becoming acutely psychotic.
"If you work with first-episode patients, you often find when they
come to the clinic that they have had a variety of diagnoses along the
way," she said. "Some of these diagnoses are legitimate, and some
represent a tendency I have seen over the years, a wish on the part of both
patients and clinicians not to have schizophrenia and so to try treatment with
other medications—antidepressants being the most common."
Retrospective case reports indicate that when a patient first comes to the
attention of the mental health system, clinicians should not assume that the
patient is experiencing the symptoms "de novo," that is, for the
first time.
"We have found that if you ask how long they have been experiencing
symptoms, at the time they first come to the clinic they will give you a
shorter duration than they will when you inquire a year later after you build
up a relationship of trust," Schooler said. "At that time, many
patients will tell you, 'Oh, I've been hearing those voices since I was in
junior high school.' But when you initially ask, they will tell you a much
shorter duration."
For research purposes, Schooler described criteria for defining
first-episode psychosis that she used in a report comparing first-episode
treatment with risperidone and haloperidol published in the American
Journal of Psychiatry in 2005.
In that study, patients were deemed to be in first episode if they had a
diagnosis of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or schizophreniform
disorder for no longer than one year; had been treated with antipsychotic
medication for no longer than 12 weeks; had no more than two hospitalizations
during the index year; and were between the ages of 16 and 45.
Schooler said that study and many others have confirmed the remarkably
rapid efficacy of medication in resolving the positive symptoms of
schizophrenia in most first-episode patients. That success is typically
greeted ecstatically by patients and family members, who are apt to present
initially in a highly fearful and confused state of mind.
This is in marked contrast to chronic patients, for whom response to
antipsychotic medication may not be so quick, and who have developed
strategies of adaptation over many years of experiencing symptoms.
"When chronic patients experience a recurrence they are liable to
think, 'Oh, yes, here are those symptoms again,'" she said. "It
may be frightening, but parts of the experience are familiar.
"In contrast, first-episode patients have a real inability to
distinguish their symptoms from reality," Schooler said. "The
degree of conviction with which the delusions and hallucinatory experiences
are accepted as real is profound.
"And family members usually are extremely fearful. They say, 'This is
not my son; I don't know what to make of it,'" she added."
Everyone is inexperienced, and they don't where to go. So the idea that
this is an illness can be very difficult to convey."
But the typically rapid success of antipsychotic medication in resolving
positive symptoms in first-episode patients can have a downside.
"The experience most people have had with medicating other illnesses
is that when they get better, they stop taking the medication and are done
with it," Schooler said.
So a crucial issue in psychosocial education of patients and families is
helping them to understand that this is an illness they are likely to be
dealing with for years. Also, the vast majority of patients who discontinue
medication will experience recurrence of symptoms, Schooler strongly
believes.
"The question is when they will invariably relapse," she
said.
Schooler said the "stress diathesis" model—in which
schizophrenia is conceptualized as a biological and genetic disorder brought
to the fore by environmental stressors—is generally one that patients
and families accept and understand. It can be a useful clinical tool in
introducing them to the need to avoid returning immediately to pre-illness
situations that are liable to be stressful and to exacerbate symptoms.
Schooler also described a model for introducing patients and families to
the need for long-term treatment built on a foundation of therapeutic trust in
which clinicians, patients, and family members are involved together in
evaluating progress in the hospital and monitoring the transition from the
hospital to the community and into a program of maintenance therapy.
The model was used for research purposes as part of the Prevent
First-Episode Relapse (PREFER) study, which was designed by Schooler and
principal investigator Peter Weiden, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and
director of the psychotic disorders program at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. But Schooler said she believes the model translates well into a
clinical setting.
In that study, patients were randomized to receive a recommendation for
oral treatment or long-term injectable risperidone microspheres. Patients
could refuse the long-acting injectable medication, and those who did were
treated with an appropriate oral antipsychotic.
Schooler said the benefit of injectable medication is the much improved
ability to monitor compliance. "You know the minute a patient is
nonadherent because he or she doesn't show up for the injection," she
said.
But she said preliminary results from the PREFER study confirm the
generally sobering picture for long-term treatment of schizophrenia—a
substantial percentage of patients in both treatment arms ceased to take
medication for at least two weeks within a 12-week period.
She noted that even with antipsychotic medication, there tends to be an"
inexorable course of relapse." Moreover, studies of outcome using
criteria for "recovery" are equally disquieting; few patients are
likely to return to normal social and occupational functioning five years
after first treatment, she said.
For these reasons, Schooler said she believes the future of psychiatric
treatment for first-episode patients with schizophrenia lies in facilitating
and improving long-term maintenance care.
"I would argue that we know how to treat the disorder acutely,"
she said. "The real issue is how to go on to long-term pharmacologic
treatment."
"Risperidone and Haloperidol in First-Episode Psychosis: A
Long-Term Randomized Trial" is posted at<http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/162/5/947>.▪