Professor Andrea Cipriani, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Director of the NIHR Oxford Health Clinical Research Facility (OH CRF), has led on a study which analysed treatments for tardive dyskinesia (TD) in people with schizophrenia or mood disorders.
TD is a condition where the patients make sudden, irregular facial or bodily movements that they cannot control.
The study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and acceptability of various pharmacological and brain stimulation interventions for TD and involved over 2,800 participants.
The study found that drugs valbenazine and deutetrabenazine were the most effective in reducing symptoms of the condition and that vitamin E could be considered as a second-line treatment.
The paper “Efficacy and acceptability of pharmacological interventions for tardive dyskinesia in people with schizophrenia or mood disorders: a systematic review and network meta-analysis”, published recently in Molecular Psychiatry, highlights the need for more trials into and additional treatment options for TD.