Patients on Atypical Antipsychotic Drugs: Another High-Risk Group for Type 2 Diabetes

Abstract

Our review in Diabetes Care (1) described the understanding of schizophrenia and diabetes and antipsychotic medication in relation to how it emerged from the published literature when we wrote the article. New results will change the emphasis in a balanced review, and delays between literature search, writing, and publication may exacerbate this phenomenon. We did not seek to prove causation or to quantify the links between specific atypical antipsychotics and the onset of type 2 diabetes. However, we presented evidence that patients with schizophrenia receiving antipsychotic drug therapy are at elevated risk of type 2 diabetes. Hardy and Breier (2), in their letter in this issue of Diabetes Care , make several points that we would like to address. First, they question the quality of the studies that we review, stating that they “are not suited to address causation.” Our review of over 50 years of literature included studies of variable quality but this richness would not satisfy modern criteria for systematic …