More Evidence That Antipsychotics Shrink the Brain
September 4, 2012
European researchers who reviewed 43 imaging studies of first-episode psychosis found evidence that antipsychotics cause a decrease in gray matter volumes in the brain. Seventy-five percent of the studies of patients who were receiving antipsychotics or had taken the drugs found a decrease in gray matter volumes; only 25% of studies in which most of the patients were drug naive or drug-free “reported such abnormalities.” The abnormalities, the researchers noted, “were significantly more severe in medicated patients.” They observed that antipsychotics may “reduce frontal cerebral blood flow,” and speculated that this “could be a mechanism underlying smaller brain tissue volumes.”
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