Download Antipsychotic and Weight Gain

Antipsychotic and Weight Gain
The question
Find an antipsychotic without the annoying side effect of weight gain.
(Often 20 per cent).
It is an added unpleasant side effect for people who suffer from psychoses to, on top of
that, also become unattractively fat. This could be a reason not to take medication.
Additionally, it could expedite isolation, with all its consequences. This is a fact that
practitioners often keep silent about. For the patients, however, this is a side effect of
major significance.
A. Burger, Groningen
The answer
The long-term use of medication always brings a dilemma: do the advantages outweigh the
disadvantages? This also applies to the use of antipsychotics. By using this, the
practitioner, together with the patient, tries to find a remedy that will provide sufficient
protection against a psychosis and that presents the smallest degree of side effects. There
are different types of antipsychotics which will unfortunately all, to some extent, lead to
weight gain. Clozapine causes the largest amount of weight gain, although remedies that
resemble Clozapine, such as olanzapine, sertindole or quetiapine, share this feature. At the
same time these are the remedies from which people usually benefit, especially when they
suffer from impassiveness. On average, aripiprazole causes the least amount of weight
gain. However, this remedy is less effective for many people and is therefore rarely
recommended.
Weight gain also often takes place at the start of the treatment. You could say that your
body’s metabolism resets itself. This way, you will retain your appetite. It makes it more
difficult to stick to a strict diet, but it really does help to eat healthy food and to try and
avoid snacks (too much fat and sugar). Many vegetables and fruits, whole wheat bread, but
also other foods with fibres, such as whole wheat pastas, can help limit the weight gain. It
is still better to prevent than to cure!
Additionally, burning all those extra calories is very important: walk your dog for an hour a
day or go cycling. Going outside for some fresh air also helps against the dulling effects that
the remedies have sometimes.
Support from a practitioner or another healthcare provider can be very helpful, by drawing
up a plan together, so discussing this issue is of great importance. Should the preventive
approach not work very well, while the medication is, in fact, effective, then an additional
remedy can be given to limit the weight gain.
This question was answered by pharmacy students, during the ‘apotheekgame’ (pharmacy
game) GIMMICS (www.gimmics.nl), supervised by Evelyn Schaafsma (pharmacy teacher)
and Anton Loonen (psychiatrist and pharmacist), a pharmacotherapy professor of
psychiatric patients. This text is a summary of their findings.
With kind regards,
University of Groningen and University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG)
Translated by Anniversary Project Group