Introduction: The paper represents a systematic review on the efficacy, tolerability and safety of paliperidone, an antipsychotic drug recently approved in Italy for the treatment of schizophrenia and of schizoaffective disorder.
Methods: A comprehensive PubMed search using the term "paliperidone" was performed from January 1980 to February 2011. Papers reporting data on efficacy in the treatment of schizophrenia and of schizoaffective disorder were included, also if published as abstracts and all retrieved articles were manually searched for other references of interest.
Results: Paliperidone was found to be effective in short and long-term treatment of schizophrenia, as well as in the treatment of schizoaffective disorder. For both disorders, paliperidone showed to be effective in improving psychotic and affective symptoms. In the studies analyzed it was well tolerated and the most frequent reported adverse events were mild extrapyramidal symptoms and an increase in serum prolactin levels.
Conclusions: Paliperidone has been shown to be an effective and safe medication for the treatment of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Further controlled clinical trials are needed to confirm this clinical profile in the long-term treatment, as well as for specific conditions such as schizophrenic patients with medical comorbidities.