QUTIAPINE, a very prescribed psychiatric treatment against bipolar disorders and schizophrenia, is experiencing important supply difficulties, warned the drug agency this Thursday, January 30, asking to restrict prescriptions.
“Medications based on Quetiapina are subject to strong supply tensions in all doses,” warned the National Medicines Agency (ANSM) in a statement.
Quetiapine is a molecule used in the treatment of several mental pathologies, including bipolar disorders and schizophrenia. It can also be used in depressions, but its use is less consensus and it is supposed to intervene that in addition to a conventional antidepressant.
It is marketed under the name of Xeroquel by the French Laboratory Chepharm, as well as under generic versions by other groups. But the basic molecule is widely produced by a Greek company, Pharmaten. However, he found a “production problem,” explains the ANSM, which announced several measures aimed at administering scarcity. Such as the prohibition of exports and, above all, a restriction of prescriptions. The drug agency asks psychiatrists not to begin treatment under quetiapina for other reasons other than a bipolar disorder.
“The alternatives must be favored for all other indications”, which, therefore, include schizophrenia, explains the ANSM.
“In psychiatry, drugs are rarely interchangeable”
However, some professionals are concerned about the difficulty of replacing other drugs with quetiapina. “In psychiatry, drugs are rarely interchangeable,” said psychiatrist Antoine Pelissolo in a blog note, the first to call the alert on Tuesday. He explains “that the therapeutic effects or side effects of two nearby drugs are often different.”
“The actions (of quetiapina) in pharmacies are exhausted everywhere or in the process of being. However, this medicine should not be suddenly interrupted, at the risk of side effects and especially potentially serious relapses, and it is very difficult to define, in A case -by -case case, a replacement molecule, “he said.
For this psychiatrist, “the current breakdown of quetiapina creates an unprecedented and really very problematic situation” that runs the risk of “destabilizing and endangering several hundred thousand people in France.”
When asking for the Ministry of Health and denouncing the lack of communication of the laboratories that market these medications, Antoine Pelissolo highlighted the suicidal risk in patients who would interrupt their treatment under quetiapina.
These supply difficulties are part of a broader context of drug shortage to which health authorities have been trying to act for several years.
Source: BFM TV
