Professional Issues >> Total Wellness

 
Weight gain is an adverse event associated with the use of virtually all antipsychotic medications, both FGA's and SGA's. The development of obesity in patients taking antipsychotic agents has been documented since the 1950s.31  Weight gain has been shown to be due to appetite increase and lack of satiety.Two review articles32,33 concur that among SGA's, clozapine appears to cause the most weight gain; followed by olanzapine and quetiapine, than risperidone an intermediate amount; and ziprasidone and aripiprazole the least. Despite these attempts to rank antipsychotics in terms of which causes the most weight gain, the more important questions concern which patients gain weight and what their baseline status was.

Ultimately, the key to weight management is caloric decrease along with exercise. This is not an easy challenge in American society with fast food everywhere, and the fact that healthier food is more costly!