The Forgotten Horrors of Tardive Dyskinesia
Medicine is about hard choices, and this adverse effect is one.
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a daily newsletter. It's about Health. One of the things that your Author, Owen Scott Muir, does, is work for a company called iRxReminder. We have a grant with the National Institute of Mental Health, where we're working, along with our colleagues at Videra Health, to build algorithms to identify tardive dyskinesia. This is part of a larger technological approach to medication adherence and adverse effect mitigation in schizophrenia. I know that sounds wonky—but here is a podcast to explain.
Today's article is about what I've seen in the course of that research. I didn't see it as clearly in the course of clinical practice, because we are bad at getting practice seeing rate and subtle things.1
Antipsychotic medications, other than clozapine, all have a risk of a late-developing movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia. This is amply highlighted if you go to the Scientology-sponsored—but theoretically, not Scientology at all, because it is just the …