• Philip G Janicak, Ira D Glick, Stephen R Marder, David T Crandall, Robert D McQuade, Ronald N Marcus, James M Eudicone, and Sheila Assunção-Talbott.
• Department of Psychiatry, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, Illinoise 60612, USA. pjanicak@rush.edu
• J Clin Psychiatry. 2009 Jan 1; 70 (1): 25-35.

ObjectiveTo evaluate the efficacy of aripiprazole across a range of symptoms-positive, negative, disorganized thought, depression/anxiety, and hostility-in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.MethodPooled data were analyzed from 5 short-term, double-blind, multicenter studies (published between 1997 and 2007) involving patients hospitalized with acute exacerbation of schizophrenia (5 studies) or schizoaffective disorder (2 studies) and randomly assigned to aripiprazole (N = 875), haloperidol (N = 193), risperidone (N = 95), or placebo (N = 406). Aripiprazole doses ranged from 2 to 30 mg/day. Patients receiving the ineffective 2-mg dose were excluded from the primary analyses presented here. Factor analysis of Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) data was used to evaluate changes from baseline with aripiprazole on 5 symptom factors-positive, negative, disorganized thought, depression/anxiety, and hostility-in 2 population subsets-schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Pairwise comparisons were made as follows for schizophrenia: aripiprazole versus placebo in all 5 studies; aripiprazole, haloperidol, and placebo in 3 studies; and aripiprazole, risperidone, and placebo in 1 study. Patients with schizoaffective disorder in 2 studies were included in the comparison of aripiprazole and placebo.ResultsAripiprazole was significantly better than placebo in improving all 5 PANSS factor scores from baseline (each p < .001) in the schizophrenia dataset. In schizoaffective disorder, aripiprazole was significantly better than placebo for the improvement of positive (p ConclusionIn this large dataset, aripiprazole was associated with improvements in a broad range of symptom domains in the short-term treatment of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.Copyright 2009 Physicians Postgraduate Press, Inc.

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