Maintenance Electroconvulsive Therapy Meeting Unmet Needs of Antipsychotics in Older Patients: A Case Report

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Author Info

Ishwary Damodaran Lee Wen Pei Sharmilla Kanagasundram Tan Chow Hock

Corresponding Author

Sharmilla Kanagasundram
Department of Psychological Medicine, University Malaya, Malaysia

A B S T R A C T

This case report highlights problems encountered by psychiatrists when treating a 68-year-old female patient who presented with a first episode of psychosis. She suffered from constipation, an anticholinergic side effect of quetiapine and both anticholinergic and extrapyramidal side effects of olanzapine. Finally, she was able to tolerate a combination of two pharmacologically different antipsychotics namely olanzapine and aripiprazole combined with a course of ECT followed by maintenance ECT. The authors would like to highlight maintenance ECT as part of the solution to patients who find it difficult to tolerate antipsychotics. Especially when only low doses of antipsychotics can be tolerated by the patient.

Article Info

Article Type

Case Report

Publication history

Received: Tue 28, Apr 2020
Accepted: Mon 11, May 2020
Published: Fri 15, May 2020

Copyright

© 2023 Sharmilla Kanagasundram. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.GGR.2020.01.06