Antipsychotic polypharmacy among schizophrenia patients in Africa: Systematic review and meta-analysis

Even though antipsychotics are ideally recommended as a monotherapy treatment, antipsychotic polypharmacy is taken by many patients with psychiatric disorder to improve poor treatment response outcome. But this imposes greater burden of adverse effects, drug-drug interaction, problems in identifying cause and effect of combined drugs, noncompliance and greater cost on patients. In Africa, antipsychotic polypharmacy is growing high due to high antipsychotic dose prescribing, repeated psychiatric hospitalization, uncontrolled psychotic symptoms, and greater side effect burden. Therefore, the aim of this review is to assess the prevalence and correlates of antipsychotic polypharmacy among patients with scizophrenia in Africa.