But if you read furthur down, you find this statement:
The findings are striking considering that perphenazine can cost no more than $50 a month compared with more than $600 for Zyprexa, depending on dose. Indeed, the nation will spend about $10 billion this year on those atypical antipsychotics, said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which funded the research.
A troubling finding: Three-quarters of patients switched medications because of inadequate symptom control or intolerable side effects.....
....First-generation drugs' chief concern was Parkinson's disease-like movement problems: tremor, rigidity, involuntary flailing. Zyprexa and its newer cousins rapidly gained popularity by promising an end to those problems, but have their own side effects....
Translation: if you take Haldol, you get stiff... you sit there and have to move your legs constantly, (restless leg syndrome).....if you take perphenazine, you don't get as stiff, and it's cheap, but you fall asleep, you might have hallucinations because it's not as strong, and you have to take it four times a day...(something not mentioned in the article)...if you take Zyprexa, you take it once a day, you move normall, you don't get "restless leg syndrome", but you get fat...if you take nothing, you hallucinate and have to be hospitalized...
Summary of the article here:
While 74 percent of patients switched drugs before the 18 months was up, only 64 percent of Zyprexa users did, giving it a slight edge. Also, 11 percent of Zyprexa users were hospitalized for schizophrenia symptoms, compared with 15 percent to 20 percent of those using the other drugs.
Now, if you notice that the rate of relapse was almost double on older medicine, you can calculate that it's actually cheaper to use Zyprexa...especially since Diabetes is treatable...
