Diagnostik und Therapie medikamentös induzierter Psychosen bei Patienten mit M. Parkinson durch niedergelassene Ärzte

Until today the strategies in the treatment of patients with Parkinson’s disease must be regarded as unsatisfactory. Due to a high number of patients complications may occur. Approximately 30 percent of the patients with Parkinson’s disease develop psychotic symptoms because of their medical treatment. These drug-induced psychoses often impair the patients and may reduce their quality of life enormously. Therefore identification and an optimized treatment of these symptoms are of prior interest. Actual recommendations suggest that the therapy should consist of reduction of anti Parkinson drugs if possible and in addition of the application of modern atypical antipsychotic drugs. For this cause Clozapin or Quetiapin are to be preferred regarding actual research. This work examined, how established physicians treat patients with Parkinson’s disease, in particular, if the patients develop psychotic symptoms. A specially developed questionnaire was used and send to over 1000 physicians of different professions. Hereby differences in diagnostics, therapy and process, between the different medical professions and in relation to the number of patients treated occurred. This investigation was able to show that physicians treating many patients with Parkinson´s disease are more sensible for the severe complication “psychosis” than physicians treating just a few, although treating these symptoms would mean a lot of improvement in their quality of life. Also differences in the way of treatment due to the field of profession of the different physicians have been found. It can be concluded that some of the physicians do not treat the topic “psychosis” carefully enough.