Journal of psychiatric practice
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This series of columns has 3 main goals: (1) to explain class warnings as used by the United States Food and Drug Administration, (2) to increase awareness of movement disorders that may occur in patients treated with antipsychotic medications, and (3) to understand why clinicians should refrain from immediately assuming a diagnosis of tardive dyskinesia/dystonia (TD) in patients who develop abnormal movements during treatment with antipsychotics. The first column in the series presented a patient who developed abnormal movements while being treated with aripiprazole as an augmentation strategy for major depressive disorder (MDD) and reviewed data concerning the historical background, incidence, prevalence, and risk factors for tardive and spontaneous dyskinesias, the clinical presentations of which closely resemble each other. The second column in the series reviewed the unique mechanism of action of aripiprazole and preclinical studies and an early-phase human translational study that suggest a low, if not absent, risk of TD with aripiprazole. ⋯ The confidence intervals for all of these potential incidence rates overlap with zero. The next column in this 5-part series reviews 37 case reports that reported TD in association with aripiprazole treatment and 27 case reports that suggested an improvement in preexisting TD with aripiprazole treatment. The fifth and final column in this series will discuss the types of prohibitively expensive and logistically difficult studies that would be needed to determine whether a definitive causal relationship between aripiprazole and TD exists.