Children, Adolescents Exposed to Antipsychotics are at an Increased Risk of Developing Diabetes

A new study has found that children and adolescents with a psychiatric disorder had a greater risk of developing diabetes if they were exposed to antipsychotics.  

Researchers at the Alborg University Hospital, Denmark, evaluated the data retrieved from the Danish register that included 48,299 children and adolescents who were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. They focused on these children to record the frequency as well as possible predictors of type-II diabetes.

Dr. Nielsen said, "The use of antipsychotic drug treatment can be necessary for some of the psychiatric disorders diagnosed in children and adolescents. This study underscores the importance of following the current guidelines that antipsychotics should only be used in children and adolescents when other evidence-based and safer treatment options have been exhausted."

They noticed that youth with psychiatric disorder taking anti-psychotic medication had 0.72 percent increased risk of developing diabetes as compared to 0.27 percent of those who did not take anti-psychotics. The risk was higher in females. But, there was no link between psychiatric diagnosis and development of diabetes.

This finding increases concern on the use of antipsychotics for non-psychotic disorder and off-label conditions like disruptive behavior disorders. The researchers further suggest that the key part of prescribing anti-psychotic medications to children and adolescents is regular cardiometabolic monitoring, testing fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C.

"The study was a longitudinal register linkage case control study of type II diabetes, defined as prescription of an oral antidiabetic drug, in all child and adolescent hospital-based psychiatric patients diagnosed in Denmark from January 1st 1999 and June 30st 2010. The time period was defined to allow full retrieval of data from all relevant registers," researchers note.

The finding was documented in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.