Attitudes of Croatian psychiatrists towards long-acting injectable antipsychotics.

BACKGROUND: Despite many advantages of long-acting injectable antipsychotics (LAIA), this type of therapy is still underused in routine practice. Since psychiatrists' attitudes play an important role in prescription rate of LAIA, we found it valuable to examine their attitudes because, according to our knowledge, there hasn't been similar research in Croatia so far.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: In this research, we included the total of 48 psychiatrists. For research purposes, we created a questionnaire modeled on standardized questionnaire. Results are described with descriptive statistics and Likert scale was used to measure respondents' attitudes to statements.

RESULTS: The number of years of their experience in practice is expressed with median of 13.50 years with minimal value of 1.00 and maximum value of 36.00 years. Most of psychiatrists find that LAIA play an important role in treatment of schizophrenia (n=44, 93.62%) and that they tend to prescribe that type of therapy (n=39, 81.25%). Almost all of psychiatrists (n=45, 93.75%) agree or strongly agree that it is easier to control patients' disease if they are treated with LAIA rather than with oral therapy and 32 of them (68.08%) think that doctor-patient relationship is more successful when patients are treated with LAIA than with oral antipsychotics. According to their experience (n=32, 68.08%) patients prefer to be treated with oral antipsychotics instead of LAIA. We expressed approximate percentage of their patients treated with LAIA with median of 20%, with minimum value of 0.00% and maximum value of 70.00%.

CONCLUSION: According to the results of our research, attitudes of psychiatrists towards LAIA are mostly positive, but considering the fact that there is a small number of their patients who are treated with them, we emphasize that psychiatrists still prescribe oral antipsychotics much more often than LAIA. Despite positive attitudes of patients towards LAIA, majority of psychiatrists think that patients would rather choose oral therapy.