2007 Volume 14 Issue 3 Pages 271-276
Antipsychotic drugs are widely used to treat mental disorders including schizophrenia. In Western countries, pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) has been reported in patients treated with atypical antipsychotic drugs including clozapine as well as conventional antipsychotic drugs including chlorpromazine. By accumulation of many evidence, the US guideline of PTE treatment recently described that the use of antipsychotic drugs is one of the risk factors of PTE. On the contrary, it is not recognized well in Japan. However, recent studies in Japan suggest that the rate of PTE associated with antipsychotic drugs is remarkably higher. Although the mechanism has not been known, hypotheses such as platelet aggregation intervened by 5-HT2A receptor and lupus-like syndromes have been proposed. It is expected that the more studies in this field may lead objective methods to prevent PTE associated with antipsychotic drugs, a life threatening disease, in the near future.
